Muscadine Season
I go to the vineyard at sunset
because I haven't decided yet
if this is a lament
or a love song.
On the drive through the Alabama back roads,
stray cotton littering the air,
the signs read,
"Yes, we have ammo!"
and "The blood of Jesus still works!"
And I can't stop the sharp flashes of shame,
remembering how earlier this week
I joked to my class of Black preteens
that I must seem like a slavedriver,
hovering over them during algebra drills.
A brief hiatus from poetry,
and it seems I've forgotten that words mean things.
Seeing I am mortified,
they laugh easily, generously,
maybe because they trust me,
definitely because we all know that
white people are ridiculous.
But it is late September,
the leaves are yellowing and letting go,
and the roadside stand
with a hand-scribbled sign announcing
the arrival of muscadine wine
has gone quiet for the evening.
I am growing older by the moment.
It's been years since making mistakes
has driven me to drink.
In the solitude, car wheels on gravel
sound like a promise.
When I was young,
I was captivated by pain,
imagining that it made me exceptional.
Until I began to arrive here, again and again,
with the fallen leaves spotted black with blight,
after years of angry, drenching storms,
learning that death is the logic of all things.
They say it is more common than you think,
how the grieving hear voices.
At first, it's just the echoes of the no longer living,
throat clearing, shuffling papers,
an indistinct call from the other room.
But soon the inanimate world--
if there is such a thing--
begins to speak
and all the rules must be rewritten.
I kick away the sweetgum balls
and sit down to write here each year
as muscadine season wanes,
because it shows me something about grief
that I didn't already know.
This is not Napa.
These vines don't just tell me what I want to hear.
Their fruit dares to ripen, englobe
as the rest of the world goes dark.
I approach them with my library voice.
They have not been waiting.
They already know what I came to say,
that the chafe and hardening of their hulls
from the fierce sun and slow growth
only makes the jam richer.
Next season, they say, we will both be older.
Yes, there will be a next season.
And yes, now we wild crones
will watch each day as our vines
grow more entangled, more unruly
until the losing delivers us again
to this late harvest.
