Low Delta Country

Driving along Highway 6
I’m not sure where the towns
begin and end. Heavy trees
lean ground-close, choked by kudzu.
Roots growing over enslaved land,
wild daffodils sprouting across
long demolished plantations
and working farms, plots pocked
with mostly unmarked graves.
I should have chased that laughter
at the gas station and said hello
to whomever stood there
but had nowhere to go but inside.
Only-towns, like only children, carry
the loneliness of broken windows
in their eyes. They disappear
when the buzzards stop their soar
over shorn fields, give up mid-air
and drop like a wine bottle.
Goldenrod. Deer bones. Billboards
for now-defunct businesses in the town’s
one strip mall. Maybe some places should rewild.
In the land of John Deere, machines pick clean
what the enslaved did by hand.
Irrigation rigs big as pterodactyls
sit idle after the harvest. Tufts of cotton
fleck the landscape like cheap insulation.