Re-Planted

He was airlifted to another place. The heath, the dales, the ridges, the high moors, they all began to slip away under throbbing wings. Occasionally a woman would approach, a silk moth in the semi-gloom of a night flight; he was tucked semi-consciously into a droning life-support system. When you are unearthed, green roots tug, mud and twigs come with you. Pools and sediment make their way as seeds and marsh traveling with your incubating soul. Places you have slept on, waded across, had breezy sex over, they tether you to tillage and turf, to your life, even as you fly far from it. He began to plant bits of himself into the soil of his new home. He hid mossy stones amid plastic rocks’ left lichen trails on the marble floors of shopping malls. He recreated his own clay from the sand-shifting soil he found in an alien loam. Slowly the land began to own him. He dug himself into the past of this remodeled wilderness. Became a native of rooted and uprooted things. When he was asked: To which country he belonged? He would show the dirt under his fingernails.