Alabama
by Al Maginnes
Rain the shade of old rust.
Red clay banks and fireflies.
Black racer snake S’ing
through itch of ankle high grass.
Enough to
set screams burning from the throat of a boy who already knows
this world is fallen, whose scream drones through
the hatchet falling on the snake’s head and on
through the final decades
of one century, the opening years
of another into a world
his bone of a body would not
fathom in the instant of that snake’s tongue flickering
quick as a pulse.
At some point he will learn
Eden only exists in our sun-drenched rearview
or in an illuminated past we were not around for.
This was no Eden,
just the first place he was allowed
to explore beyond his backyard,
to walk the landscape
of thorned bushes, sharp-limbed trees, chiggers and flies,
elders who might praise or strike, often
for the same reasons.
Another night in Alabama,
a friend and I sat quiet on a brick patio
he’d built in his backyard, a wide and startling
clarity of stars above us
while we wedged deep
into whatever thoughts we might have carried then.
I thought I might
write a poem about that night,
but I forgot it until JB’s soul flew into retirement.
Here is melody.
The night sky, the stars, the wavering lamp
of the moon force their own music. We know
other tales as well.
Sweeter tongues than mine testify
to the mystery we navigate,
stronger throats
tell how the textures of sand and gravel
are altered by blood,
how a church explodes
into broken red brick, into steel
and splinters, into a fallout of debris scattered
across decades,
the thousand soft occasions
of hate gathering in the soft unsteady hands
of a boy who has just learned what a gun can do,
the half-dozen red lasers targeting his chest,
in the munitions stored and oiled, ready
to take their turn in the argument.
Say this word—Alabama—long enough,
it becomes a mantra.
Alabama. Alabama, Alabama.
So does any word if you say it
long enough.
Alabama. Where I have not set foot in thirty years.
Alabama. Where I first saw an adult baptized.
Alabama. Where I learned a president could die.
Why do your antique kudzu vines reach for me
now,
except that something made me think of paradise,
and it was there in your buildings and backyards,
where I learned the mortal fear that told me
paradise is no permanent thing.