Untitled Southern Hunger [working draft]

Anna and I made that oath beneath trees. Pinnacle
of July, 7th year, cicadas. Ousting everyone's memory of them
to hike root and bark, fuck, then drip twitching in

a fluency, a sound I could hear beyond the clatch
and hum, and almost follow. “Osteoblast,” my friend
said, “a blooming nothing,” and it would take a while to settle.

Afraid to point to the problem that functions
like a mutual mind, I let it think. And it did.
And my courage became a climb from soon to past

and my marriage became a kind of ruined glass
shivering whatever was beyond it, whatever it
could not hush down into embers.

Beating the Sky Way out of Johannesburg, I headed
where my wife wasn't. Straight towards her.
One shade. Erratum. The great American arboretum.

And then, for me, transience stopped. I hung on
like rock, like time itself. The day’s light opined
a place where numbers failed me. No addition. No subtraction.

This was in Peoria, not Pretoria, so the blooms, though
alien, were Midwestern. Hidden in the science of
each was a generative grammar, Latin. Mimosifolia. Always

when pitching for humility, for grace,
they told me
hold [______________] in your deepest pocket,

so when they put out my
eyes I'll see
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/BlueJacarandaFlowers.jpg