In yards and medians of interstates,
on grounds of factories and hospitals
in Atlanta, Charlotte, Greenville, Nashville,
are patches of Green River soil. For each
boxwood and sparkling pine, every dogwood
and maple from a nursery here goes with
its ball of mountain dirt to the new bed.
Every rhododendron must keep its roots
in Blue Ridge loam. And while the loam
is scattered in clots of gunpowder black
all over the South, the topsoil in these
mountain coves gets thinner, pocked as sponges,
fissioned to the suburbs, cities, greasy
savings of centuries of leaf rot, forest mold
nursed by summit fogs and isolation,
sold to decorate the cities of the plain.
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