State Song, and: Turning Fifty in the Confederacy

Abstract

State Song, and: Turning Fifty in the Confederacy Lesley Wheeler (bio) State Song Because I call you, wind strips treesof little limbs they did not need.The streambed tilts a muddy ear and I pour words into its drain, the cup-shape someone's heel dug filling upas if with rain. Because I call us together, the mountain blushes. A curtainparts, dissolves into rags of steam. Sunand clouds pattern fields with roving spotlights. Because I call you, powerthrums the ground. Now is the hour,gilded, grand. I call this dazzle ours. [End Page 35] Turning Fifty in the Confederacy To live and die in Dixie was neverthe plan. Old times here seemed bestforgotten, so down I plowed them.Heritage, clay. Atrocity, clay. Not secession; dispossession.Long Island's where I was born,three o'clock on a starry morning,bleating an American hymn: there is no here. Away, away.At twenty-six, pitched what seemedlike camp in a Virginia valley.First draft, provisional, now set in sediment. There's shamebeneath my fingernails,isotopic signatureof stolen soil in my bones. I'm made of Dixie. Forgetting'sthe trick of Daniel Emmett's air,lifted from Ohio neighbors,the Snowdens, black musicians. Dixie may have been a Harlemfarmer who sold slaves south,and one of them, name unsung,composed that verse of yearning to return. Story goes, the Lost Causeanthem began as a wishto slip north, passed from authorto fiddler to the white guy who filed copyright. Look away. Yearswash past in silty muck. Can't carrythis tune; can't give it back.Its burden stuck. Become me. [End Page 36] Lesley Wheeler LESLEY WHEELER's forthcoming books include Unbecoming, her first novel; The State She's In, her fifth poetry collection; and Poetry's Possible Worlds, a suite of hybrid essays. Recent work appears in Massachusetts Review, the Common, Gettysburg Review, and other journals. Poetry editor of Shenandoah, she lives in Virginia. Copyright © 2019 University of North Carolina Wilmington