Our Paper Trail
David Antonio Moody
Vast timberlands in Florida contain longleaf yellow pine,
deep swamp tidewater, red cypress stands of trees.
I am here
with my reflection in the ditch runoff of SR-100.
One water bottle,
two flat tires, no cell signal, so what’s new.
My reflection and I
thumb at each semi, but they are timed driving
to and from each timber mill.
To pass time we play dead
in the median, I tell him about what’s overhead:
balloon strings,
data clouds, sparrows and their nests, pine needles sick
with a fungus blight, their trunks cat-faced with v-shaped
taps that once channeled resin, a poor attempt
to seal its wound.
¤
Lost in thoughts, my likeness wanders
up the groves.
Rows for felling, pressure treatment, some
pulped for toiletries, some copy paper.
Sweet-smelling,
tight-grained, extremely durable wood.
I figure it
the difference between now and then: buckshot pocks
in denuded bark, spray paint on conifers
note who doesn’t matter.
Off this or that washboard road,
the same peacock sky where my sister
hunts for Jesus.
Eventually asphalt cedes to tire tracks,
open-ended deer paths, presently no deer.
¤
So where is that tow truck?
I miss my chance at faith
some afternoons, the shade of crop pines so opaque
with the names of black or poor convict loggers
arrested as vagrants after their county claimed
their homes.
North, Etonia Creek, Work Farm Road.
The mill
where another sustainable forest initiative rolls
new hires into its yard.
Workers in off-yellow legacy boots,
their breast pocket maps a plan for local fields.
Which one is
my grandfather?
Where is his son?
I descaled pinecones poorly
as redfish.
All they wanted was respect if not a decent wage.
¤
How can I go home and say I understand
decolonization, a term for removing brown stock
and foreign matter that escaped digestion
when making kraft paper?
Currently bleached reams
dominate wholesale.
I am left thinking of Doña Ana sands
bombed more white by errant missile practice,
a cousin with soft gypsum between her toes.
We all find
a way to take root.
Here, East Palatka is the name of holly,
a female clone indigenous and lean
underrepresented in open market trade.
Consider the aging
of my family against the growth rate
of bermuda weeds.
Evenings of violence ahead of a hurricane,
my own avenue, goals of laying berm.
¤
At this rate I could walk to the house where I was raised,
warn its owners about its septic tank.
Only so much solvent
can legally seep.
Do they get why fields next door were clear cut,
diamonds not meant for softball runs?
I carry poems
I did not write—the norm—and whisper them aloud
when left to myself, underlining typos
despite library rules.
My hope is a worker,
if not their kid, will write out a formula
defining what percentage of pulp from the mill
we’re sold each morning as our local news.
Crop acreage
and ink markup aside, the numbers are vague.
How much
does it cost us, every new edition?
¤
I lean upon a wire fence, check my phone again.
Share with me
a sacred place as I shared this place with you, at least
its county line.
Pull our page a little closer.
What do we inhale
if not the egg odor of sulfur in a vat?
If nothing else,
grant me one request: lay in the grass beside me
back to back.
When you’re done here, please give
this book a home.
Give it away or give it a grave.
As with old tires,
buried before burned.
I don’t believe a forest can regrow
from its pages, though most seeds need burial,
every need a seed.
If we agree our children
tend to forget us, let’s proceed on the premise
we have everything to lose.
It’s not like that has ever
helped you.
It’s not like that:
I believe it should.
David Antonio Moody teaches creative writing and composition at Arizona State University. He is a docent at the Phoenix Art Museum and former production editor for The Cortland Review. His recent poetry appears in Juked, The Florida Review, and Watershed Review. David holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University where he performed feats of balance in the Jack Haskin Flying High Circus.