Poem of Yard Work, with Confederate Jasmine

We drag to the curb for bulk
waste pickup the limbs and branches 

shorn off the confederate jasmine 
at the end of the yard: they'd bent

too far over the neighbor's fence,
they might be felled by wind or 

rain and cause unwanted damage 
to others' property. We don 

garden gloves just to be sure 
there's no skin contact with 

its milky, rubbery sap. After 
effort, the skin cools as sweat 

dries; and any clustered blooms 
among the debris soon shrivel

in high heat. So far from Asia,
where other names for it are star

jasmine and trader's compass, here
in the North American south I can't

think of it now except for its
association with that history

of civil war. Seven slave-
holding states against the Union, 

their plantation economies dependent 
on the labor of dark slave bodies;

Fire-Eaters whose cornerstone
beliefs were based on the idea

that subordination to the white
man is the black race's God-

ordained, natural condition. 
I too would have been indentured

at that time; or made to suckle
my master's white child like a cow 

with a teat full of milk. When I crush 
a sprig in my brown hands, a faint 

perfume still rises from out 
of the lanceolate leaves: fetid note 

from history our pruning still 
hasn't managed to extinguish.