Larry Thacker
Blood & Kudzu
I walked the grounds of my conception,
hunting through the crawling green for some
sentimentality, perhaps expecting un-riddled
things to speak from the ground of my past.
I returned, horrified, a confusing smell of Kudzu
and disturbed soil laced in my skin, cocooning any
possibility of reunion. For three days I waited,
reliving the lesson’s emptiness, until the last
hints of disappointment floated away.
Nothing remains of where I’m from. No thing.
No struggling root or stem. No whispering sigh.
No half-exposed garbage hinting as to what was.
There is only the clean, guiltless absence of sound,
deep green and slow, moving when you aren’t looking.
For Kudzu conspires to murder our memories.
In the deepest summer days its vine and leaf will choke
over a body or a bloodstain – evidence of you – overnight.
This is the best place to kill thoughts of a missing home.
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