I’ll never sympathize with those boys
I’ll never sympathize with those boys who drive around our mud roads in their pickup trucks and wave their red, thirteen-starred flags with pride.
And I don’t think I’ll ever feel wholly comfortable in this island town with only four stoplights and one main road.
But it’s fall now, which means that mild December snows are approaching fast, and all the people are starting to look fragile
And thin and sort of sad in the way that shrubs seem to know they won’t make it long through he winter.
Before the frost comes, though, it always rains real hard here, like we’re stuck in the middle of an unnamed hurricane,
And once the rain settles, the air tastes a lot like tobacco. It’s times like these that I have to resist the urge to stoop down and claw at the earth
Until my fingernails are the same color as the sandy Carolina soil. I’m afraid, I guess, of taking some part of that soil
And making it part of me. Because then, I might be tempted to start to grow roots and pull some nourishment out of the soil.
See, you’ve already got me drinking Kentucky bourbon more often than wine and it feels like everything’s starting to shift
As if we’re all in a sort of whiskey haze and watching from a vantage deep in the Appalachian mountains.
