Plantation

My shovel meets its first bone, marrow

gone, hollow of damp dark matter.

My maiden name, she says, is Grimball.

Our plantation ran from here to the river.

Grimball cuts across Secessionville.

Out back a wound filled with salt water,

a field that grew acres of tomatoes.

My live oak dates from the Civil War.

Black homes. White homes. Bay-

onets of white bloom overlay

the green of my oak-leaf hydrangea.

Nothing seems to secure the deck planks

to town hall. Screws diagonally sunk

obscure the bonds, the lacerated chambers.

The Heronry [excerpt]

by Mark Jarman

I’m talking about a few minutes of stillness a day

as birds did their work and, stiller than I,

the golden bush and ice plant ingested the sunlight,

the clouds, always moody, chose a single mood,

the night herons studied their dreams,

and a loneliness that I still believe was solitude

dusted me with its pollen. . . .

I almost think I could write about it forever,

adding word to word like coral in a reef,

an excess of language like the genetic code, an extravagance

       like all the stars,

too much ever to be needed except

by the need for there always to be more,

that need which, when the end comes, looks past it

for woods and hills and ocean,

for fields and streets and houses and horizon,

repelled by blankness, expecting beyond sleep

the dream country and its population.