Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

the chemo done dried her up and hollowed her out the way the sun and the air do water oaks.

all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee.

I ate him with my eyes.

Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.

the water was a living wet plain around him,

Can’t nothing bother me when I got my hands in the dirt, he said. Like I’m talking to God with my fingers.

the way they turn to each other like plants following the sun across the sky. They are each other’s light.

“Home ain’t always about a place.

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time.

two sure knocks, hard as a horse’s hooves on asphalt.

would throw up everything. All of it out: food and bile and stomach and intestines and esophagus, organs all, bones and muscle, until all that was left was skin. And then maybe that could turn inside out, and I wouldn’t be nothing no more. Not this skin, not this body.

I want to walk out the room. Walk out the front door. Walk straight to the bayou, to the water, step on it, shimmering glass under my soles, and walk until I disappear over the horizon.

The old folks always told me that when someone dies in a bad way, sometimes it’s so awful even God can’t bear to watch, and then half your spirit stays behind and wanders, wanting peace the way a thirsty man seeks water.”

wakes up like that all the time, trailing the blankets of her dreams behind her.

“Pulling all the weight of history behind him.”

Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.

she has so much unresolved pain from losing her brother and from the various ways she’s convinced that she has disappointed her parents that she just can’t see past that pain to move beyond herself and focus attention on her children.

we carry family history inside us like ghosts.

William Faulkner, to Richard Wright, to Eudora Welty, to Anne Moody, to Margaret Walker—have