A Deserter Inheritance

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A Deserter's Inheritance


Roughly five branches up the tree, the height

he might have perched above marsh-suck


and the hollow click of fiddler crab to clamp

eyes on the black plume of Sherman’s North 


as it burned down from Atlanta, someone 

who bore some portion of my double-barreled


helix waited till dusk to throw off the grey

of his conviction and silently return 


to the rubble of the family farm. He mended

the fence, but long since slipped his post


again, surrendering a surname firm-set

as the charred ribs of Old Sheldon Church,  


those pillars leaning like the head-tilt of all

who wonder—gathering the gleanings 


of ourselves—just what to make 

with the peculiar bevel of our inherited beams.

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