Smoke whistles from the west through Jack Pine
and Black-Gum, fed by fire that jumped
from the hair of Blackeyed Susan.

She ate her child, it’s told, carved up
with an ivory-handled dirk and washed down
raw with cider. No truth to that, but damned
if witch hazel will burn or float.

One autumn, she took me in a sorghum shack
’til the purple-orange and yellow flames raised blisters
and we howled in our twined, rot-jute coupling.

All of Shanandoah County
clanged to our brass-bell holler of pain and love
as it passed over the heads of deer,
then dove through rock for water and came out
camphor-thirsty with hiss and skeee.

A curtain of fire follows now over gullies, pig farms,
the scattered cornstalks; squats down hard
and unforgiving on the low-country. Let ’em weep
for their own, for all the coal-hearted ghosts of unborn children
that nip at heels, and steal the sleep of honest folk.

There’s nothing left but slate and salted plots
where she and I wandered through the tapestry of animals,
hogpoor and dazzled by the ragged earth,
the slick-edged sky.

One must believe
in the match and kerosene, in the pure
glory of fire when casting out the clacking,
charred femurs of a wife; must know,
like a needle through the eye,
that the right place to scatter bones

is among the swamp of reeds and sawgrass
that loves nothing, not the wind’s whisper
nor even the moon’s Judas kiss.

Now her mica-eyed ravens
hum in a circle to the south.

The whirlwind back-draft raises them
above the Hemlocks. They glide over the Rappahannok
like God’s willow passing over my face, come to claim
the ring from the left hand of hope.

Turn over in your pyres of sleep,
daughters of Shanandoah, rub your inner thighs
against the cool cotton sheets, blaze to cinders
in your dreams as I pass, more ghostly than a man,
horned and spark-clawed, free at last
of my Blackeyed Susan.

In the glowering sky
        thunders a hammer of birds…