"Now I lay me down to sleep..."
Crickets sing a rusty symphony in the cradling darkness
every night in Mississippi.
In memory, winter refuses to appear:
Remembrance is always of summer,
eternal summer, with heavy air and billowing thunderclouds
and watermelon eaten under the ever-present threat of storm.
Every day the outburst lingers
somewhere just under the horizon,
underlying the gardening, tennis and shared smiles
like a barely-felt cavity:
Dormant, but near a crashing explosion of pain,
thunder and lightning.
The people echo the weather here;
warm, smiling people
who shake your hand and offer you a drink,
wreck your life with a gracious nod,
and can kill you dead without a qualm when the storm hits.

"I pray the Lord..."
A certain artfulness is required in the matter.
Not enough the solemn prayers and tearful confessions
to a life of sin at the age of eleven;
not enough that every vessel fashioned from dirty clay
by the hands of the master has a flaw.
It must also be filled to the brim with a portion of guilt
that rivals the widow's oil
for endless replenishment.

"I pray the Lord my soul to keep..."
After years spent away in other madnesses,
in others' fantasies, dawns the realization that there was once something here.
After years of selling souls to Manhattan and L.A.,
of moving up and making it big,
plastic years of forgetting who we are and where we came from,
because it is not Hollywood
we overlook the soldier in the park,
the slow-moving muddy river,
and the tall white-columned houses with empty windows
like dark eyes
reproaching our bartered souls.

"If I should die before I wake..."
God knows the shuttered hearts and the sepulchred souls of the placid people.
In the light he hides his face behind
rock-of-ages churches,
smiling politicians with Sunday-frozen families,
and love-thy-neighbor preachers on their way to burn another book,
or soul.
But in the darkness,
when the old day is dead and buried and the new day lies in pre-natal slumber,
at three o'clock in the morning,
when the only inhabitants of a stagnant world
are a few trembling souls and their vicious fears,
at three o'clock in the morning,
when the only conceivable answer to any question is God,
prayers falter and fall with heavy thuds on unhearing ears,
and the darkness giggles softly
as it probes with icy fingers
into the unshielded soul.
At three o' clock in the morning,
God laughs at the heart of man and sends a burden of dark visions,
dimming the once-bright light of life into merely
the reflection of a distant carnival
on a tombstone.

"I pray the Lord my soul to take..."
The land promotes a quiet insanity.
Miles from anything of significance, no mountains challenge the spirit,
no oceans soothe the soul.
Rivers flow deep, muddy and slow.
Lush growth is brown-edged and coated in dust
and the air lies still, a suffocating quilt over the land.
Under the unforgiving sky,
surface-simple life teems with
petty intrigues, hidden frustrations
and incipient madness
as we all smile and charm our ways
straight from this earthly purgatory
into heaven or hell.
Even money either way.

"Now I lay me down to sleep..."
Perchance not to dream.
While remembered crickets sing in the star-studded blackness,
to know that something lives here that lives
nowhere else in the land;
something that sleeps in the shadows and hides in darkness,
something that rocks many lives into quiet contentment
and torments a few into lonely brilliance that
lights the skies
as it dies.
The few who follow in
the steps of Orpheus and return for a brief moment
with their message
of eternity,
of the lonesome beauty that sears the soul,
are true children of the South,
clearing the path that,
a few lives hence,
we all will follow.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
And the darkness calls my name.