Charlottesville
Charlottesville
I lived on Grounds, two doors down
From the room Poe had lived in.
Coming home drunk from the bars
On the Corner, I never didn’t stop
And stare through the plexiglass
At the raven silhouetted in the window.
Oh how I wanted to be haunted!
And oh how I hated UVA.
The guys wore bowties, the girls
Floppy sun hats. On weekends
They drank mint juleps
And went to the horse races.
They lived antebellum lives.
In another time they slapped
Their thighs with gray suede gloves,
Broke out in diamonds at balls.
Grounds was one of those places
The South had survived itself,
Like those prehistoric ferns
That survive in microclimates.
To survive myself I drank, and,
Slowly, over two arduous years,
Carried most of the poetry
Out of the library and into my room,
Diligent and dangerous as a wasp.
I built my own Manhattan of books,
The bottom volumes forgotten
Until I got a notice they were due.
I should have returned them.
Instead, I renewed and renewed.
Come winter I bought wood
From a townie, one of the few
Who had fires. This was before
The Nazis marched through Grounds
With torches chanting about Jews,
Before they killed Heather Heyer,
Before a crane lifted Robert E. Lee
Out of the park. But it was there
Already, a darkness, so that when
I heard about what had happened
I wasn’t surprised. What saved it all
For me was one of my professors.
When he was a boy, he killed his brother
In a hunting accident. One rainy night,
Crossing the Lawn after a reading,
He shared his umbrella with me.
I thought it was beautiful how
The same hand that pulled the trigger
Held what gave us shelter.