And perhaps someday my own ashes
will be scattered through the meadows
of tickseed, carrot weed, and drooping dog
hobble, Kentucky wildflowers that I love.
A speck of me might be caught in the wind
and dropped like a flea into the cupped hand
of a bellflower, falling upon a beetle that has slipped
away and has fallen asleep within that blossom.
When later the beetle is eaten by the finch
I might be swooped through the blue air of summer,
riding as high as any of the orthodox resurrected.
Poet’s Note
"Resurrection" is from The Vine Temple, my chapbook forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in February 2023. To my surprise, I’ve come to primarily think of myself as a poet of place, though my place isn’t a region; rather my place is within the circumference of a few miles of my home that I’ve made with my family in an old country church built before the American Civil War and which sets next to a humble graveyard. What I’ve learned is that this place stirs my imagination so completely with ideas of faith, death, the supernatural, nature, fairness, memory, and history that I can write about whatever I’d like even while staying within what I suppose many would consider tight boundaries.