Extinction Economy,
or The Grapefruit Orchards of South Texas
I didn’t listen. When you said
it’d be bad. I learned the hard
way. It was stupid. A garden
once grew. Then there was a tree. It
bore grapefruit. Someone said, eat it.
Learn something you didn’t before.
A snake oil salesman said it. He
asks if the stars are baring teeth.
Smiling awake? Look, I’m naked.
These secret leaves. We plant orchards.
We become aspiring merchants.
We squeeze the bittered sweetness out.
We left out stories. We left out greed.
Or we made it everlasting.
Pestilence, famine, war, death
—could finally ravage the field.
We’re breaking up. When we started,
we were pure. Nobody else could
peel our skin. Touch the rubied
rind. Your delicious mouth alone.
Let it rot, love. Tell everyone
we’re not together. We ate it.
But everyone was hungry. Plant
another fruit tree. Let limbs frost.
One day, the rich will keep them fenced.
Nothing green. No orchards to tend.
Bruised. Nothing good. Don’t let me pick
for you, or you, or you, or my
self-portrait as a newborn whim.
Listen, an angel could save me.
Wet Bark
I consider the pastoral.
I’m considering the storied violence—when people once
gut bark, they gut buffalo, they grind bones
daily and they wait, and when they
walk down hill country. Years of dust,
years of pollen stick to the fields, grass
blooms. Beasts come grazing. Believers,
come eat. Get sick. Love another. Then die
in places like Dripping Springs.
Driftwood. Spicewood. Blanco. Marble Falls.
Lampasas, Texas. These days feel
like bluffs, like broken-in homes.
Like trespassing signs everywhere
or uprooted. Trees litter yards until
not a single body leaves.
These days, it either rains or
it’s the bygone era of hills
coming like a downpour in April.
I’m drowning and flooded by
denial. Have you heard the news?
We’ve reached the timeline where
we bit jetstreams in the ass. Suddenly,
the slowing patter of sobbing
sounds like my Father dying.
These are the days when Fathers
are buried. Or burned.
He could be godless. I stalked
Barton Creek one morning like nothing
was wrong. Watch me wade knee-deep
in ghosts, the creek, the water snakes, and
watch me cutting branches away. I hike out of
light rain, fog, cloud, thunder—and the flash flood
warning. I keep my chin above water.
I know there’s a meadow. Flowers are coming.
Brambled mornings when the woods get damp
are coming. Birds will eat cedar berries.
And someone will cut and plant something new.
