~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Kelly Whiddon

Guide to the Southern Magnolia

I used to love it, its leaves like wax,

its double blossoms of white

saucer petals—like faces.

When pruned at the base,

it is great for climbing. I used

to scale its speckled branches,

smell the heady mix of sweet

and earth, so high that the limbs

at my perch were thin,

their scrawny forks just big enough

to squeeze in a small foot, sway

with my own weight, my head popping out

of the top branches like a birth.

I remember looking out and down—

the world my campus–what a luxury,

what a privilege to be at its top.

I mean, it existed before the bees,

which suggests, ironically,

that it is older than puberty,

a stage that came for me,

about the time I stopped

climbing trees.

The oldest tree on the grounds

of the White House is a southern

magnolia planted in the 1830s

by Andrew Jackson, who made

his fortune through slavery

on his cotton plantation, the one

that produced the seedling

for that tree. I imagine them,

his slaves, at his home,

the Hermitage,

in the fields, sweating,

blistered skin, looking

up at the birds perched

on magnolia branches, singing, primed

to fly but instead just swaying

swaying swaying with the limbs.

The Victorians believed

it symbolized nobility,

but it has come to mean

more: new beginnings,

endurance, longevity.

Last year, New Orleans police

caught surveillance of a thief,

a man on a bike stealing a 3-foot

magnolia tree right out of the ground,

roots and all, in front of a public

building—just rode up, plucked it

from the dirt, and rode away

in the night, tree balanced on his thighs.

There was no violence, no anger—

I’ve seen the video—

just a claiming, or a reclaiming,

a thoughtful haul, peddling

away like Mary Poppins

on a spring day or Butch Cassidy

carting his friend’s girl

on the handlebars

to a Burt Bacharach

melody, hearing

that refrain buzzing

or chirping or warbling

through his brain:

because I’m free,

nothing’s worrying me.

Haunted Pub Crawl

We spent a weekend walking in Savannah

and one night took a guided tour of haunted pubs

because hanging out with blitzed ghosts

seemed like a fun thing to do.

Our guide, who daylighted as a pirate waiter,

told us their drunken confessions:

the riverfront ghosts believed God kills us when

we get bored, and Confederate ghosts

could feel their bones straining against

their imperfect hearts, jacked-on-whisky

and gangrene.

I could never hold my liquor, so I held

your hand, eating up the denim sky as it filtered

through the old curling tree branches that dipped

down onto park squares.

Our guide said to watch out; brick mason ghosts

could fall like apples through the third floor

taverns. He said their bodies were buried under

the cobblestones and scotch bonnet shells

beneath our feet.

And in the courtyards at night, girl scout founder

Juliet Gordon Low’s ghost danced with the ghost

of jazz age crooner Johnny Mercer, each knowing

that pain is a way to wake us up, and bliss is something

to carry, for protection, like a song.

What did we know of how the past blurs

into future, of how life’s pains

could make us feel like Shanghaied sailor

ghosts on schooners, watching the land drift away,

their hearts a dream they waved to on the shore?

In all, it seemed the night was singed by souls lost

to this city, and we touched timidly,

as if a graze could suck us

into the sozzled dead.

It couldn’t.

Your warm digits, your rummy breath: they

were as rousing and alive as the young history

between us, as potent as the phantoms

up ahead.

Kelly Whiddon has published in Cimarron Review, Southeast Review, Meridian, Crab Orchard Review, Slipstream, and Summerset Review, among others. Her book The House Began to Pitch (Mercer UP) was honored with the Adrienne Bond Poetry Award. She teaches English and creative writing at a small university in Macon, Georgia.