What We Love, What We Become
Illumination can spring from anywhere: the beach, our vices, or the sacred tomato sandwich.
EDGE OF TOWN
We love what will kill us.
Guns, trucks, meth, alcohol.
They’re the chains that hold
us until we are fit
for final boxes or urns.
We sit out the long haul
remembering our malls
chock full of new shoe shops.
We pass a cigarette
dipped in Cee Bee Dee oil,
tasting resignation
and the bite of regret,
while the stronger weeds poke
through the time-cracked cement.
TOMATO SANDWICH
clouds touch
a field of snow
soft white bread
and tangy mayo
sunset at center
Brandywine yellow
Oaxacan pink
Bear Creek red
Cherokee purple
garden-grown
handheld sky
summer rain drips
from your chin
as you bite in
OUTSIDE A VAPE SHOP IN ALAMANCE COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA
Kudzu is our destiny;
it covers our history
taking pine trees limb by limb,
tobacco barns board by board.
All the things we say made us
are still hidden when withered—
dry, brown, and crisp underfoot.
There is more here than homes
for spiders and snakes. Six deer,
this fall noon, blend into kudzu.
Two young males set at each other,
made seasonally mad by sex,
smash, mis-paired and antler-locked,
into the vape shop window.
And vultures stack overhead—
beautiful at a distance—
dropping as if from pride to shame
then soaring back to pride again,
waiting for their next chance
to separate flesh from bones,
to pick apart what has passed
leaving what must be known.
NIGHT SWIM, NORTH MYRTLE BEACH, 1968
The moonlight became a cloak for us,
as close to us as skin.
Even our hair was dressed in stars.
There was so little between us
and all that found a life in the water.
No matter how far we swam,
there was still some place deeper,
some place both dark and alive,
some place that needed stars
and a little of the moonlight.
We knew we could share
what we had there.
Last year an old fisherman told us,
I know you will come here again.
It had been raining then
and a new moon
had turned its light away from here.
He knew the moon would return to give
what it could of light
that wasn’t from itself,
but sun-borrowed and meant
to be passed on.
No different from what we wore now,
our suits of light and life,
all the small glowing bodies,
the satisfying taste of salt,
the green glowing pools
our footprints left in the sand.
Paul Jones is an inductee of the North Carolina State Computer Science Hall of Fame. Some of his poems crashed into the moon, carried by Israel’s Beresheet lunar lander. His book, Something Wonderful, is available from Redhawk Press.
Great captures of being Southern.