———-—for Lillian Smith
Above my bed your sister’s crayon
rubbing reads, Good frend for Iesvs
sake forebeare / To digg the dvst
encloased heare… Forty days
dry and what was rotten in me,
round as an apple tumbled
into earth, seems to have gone,
though I know better, awake in this
cricketing dark with a stomachache
from bourbon truffle ice cream.
Wild nights give way
to morning’s hush. Memory
and the present like a sheet fresh
from the ream. I write, imagine
how you must have looked in the mirrors
I preen in here, what these
rhododendrons meant to you,
their leaves like a girl’s cropped hair.
The pool the campers once swam
is a kind of living grave now,
one I inspect on tippy-toes,
that silhouette I see, nearly a face
in the rainwater deeps, red with tannins
like stained glass, and across it
the water bugs walk, wrinkling
the light, nearly pricking the surface-
skin while the empty mouths
of chantarelles say, Come
on the bolls of air under oaks
that say, Come here. But a landscape
is only itself. Our grief
consists in this, and our hopeless joy.
I like to imagine it is the reason
someone named this mountain
Screamer, where the structures molder
in an undying underlife of green.
They remind me of the film
I watched last night on your CRT.
Russian. Tarkovsky. In the story
we enter a Zone (Greek for girdle)
where three men go, Writer,
Professor, and Stalker, their guide,
and each seems to be searching
for something off-screen, glinting
from the tree line. Their lives
in the world past, they tramp through
a waste of fallout, nameless disaster
only the effects of which
we can see, a little window
of history, though flora grows
where it will, so any place,
while a German shepherd (the dog)
appears occasionally blearing
black-brown through weeds, a link
to their silence and the body
lost within it. Like the Wise Men,
they go to a place where, they are told,
dreams come true, the wish
that roots so deep it resists intuition
as dream, and they, and you,
the viewer, we, are fate’s tender fruit,
breathing ripples of shadow
grown up from our veins’
sunk desire, clawing time’s ladder
in the wrong direction toward a ball
of fire so apparently other
to this world one can only call it holy.
I wonder would you like it,
or see it as merely frivolous.
I pull on shorts, pad through your
late quarters, preserved, don’t worry,
perfectly by the current owners—
the typewriter hunched on the oak
bureau, your bed made for good,
a bourbon bottle or two, empty
on the sideboard, glass a green-gray,
even your boots, set at the edge
of your Shaker rug, all waiting
with the silent insistence of things
till the Second Coming
by a door that opens now to the porch
and morning. Silence. Distant
thunder. In my misery, I waited
for the earth to open—a body
behind the trees—eyes, knees,
a beginning I could touch with my own
bitten fingers—and an end too.
A then. Here it’s just the leaves
of the lindens flashing their silver bellies,
though this does mean something.
Rain is coming. Would you come back,
Lillian? I drink black coffee,
consider the pit in the peaches I eat,
and what has come of it? I imagine
the sound of your tires approaching
on the gravel drive. A stone
rolling away. No, a swollen creek.
Sit beside me and listen. Yesterday, she appeared.
The dog came at me. I saw the dark
chocolate fur and wanted to live.
Daniel DeVaughn is a poet from Birmingham, Alabama. His debut collection, The Passion, winner of the 2025 Omnidawn Poetry Open Book Contest, is forthcoming.
Photo by Matt Hoffman on Unsplash
