“If I could do it over
                             I’d have waited for this moment
                            to give my heart to you unbroken.”

                                                               — Clay Walker

My One, Great Love—
how can I tell you
the way I wish I could be—
the way I wish I could have been—
yours and only ever yours—
from my start?

                        *** 

In 1607, English settlers broke themselves—
from everything they & their ancestors had
known—against these pre-American shores,
in what would become
Virginia.

                                 I can only imagine the dread they felt
finding Bald Cypress trees emerging from marsh waters
like gnarled, grey fingers reaching up to draw a new sky
down to unseen, stagnant depths.

& then came the Fall.  & the gooseflesh of the winter
that rose and consumed supplies, leaving them
unprepared for a new world.  We’re told
of Virginia Dare, born to first August, abandoned
first scion of those who remained, those who’d gone on
to what would become
North Carolina, those
who would disappear
into the knife-etched word,
Croatoan.

                              I wonder if any had stayed, if any
had seen the magic of the swamps presided over
by that Fall.  If they’d woken to the spectacle
of something beautiful—the dawn light
falling across still water in a rainbow
of dead & dying things. 

                                 *** 

You can still see it, today:  The Rainbow Swamps
of the Bald Cypress Trail at First Landing
State Park—towering, sentinel trees
giving up the ghost of their leaves
like tears at a wake, leaves
leached of the oils
of life

                   that, seemingly, supernaturally, rise
to the surface of this modern American Gothic
under-story, those Bald Cypress trunks,
& their bent and twisted knees
a penitent iridescence
& wonder to what
can remain, even
in the afterlife
of a swamp.  

I’ve yet to see
anything akin to this
peculiarity of the natural order,
this artistry of deconstruction,
this evidence that even after
everything seems to fall
apart, seems to decompose,
seems to pass from anything
could be called lovely—seems
to herald the end of anything
once believed—there remains

an Artist
capable of bleeding
beauty from the madness,
order from despair, overwhelming
joy despite the sadness of regret
& in that first & final
light of the end
of days

pour out—
stir color—
in the places
we believed
hopeless
& broken;

where dead & dying
hearts can once
& once again

be found

beautiful

together.