Hierarchy of Paradise

Far north the mortar of gutted cotton
mills, up a river’s long dark mane
of whispers, high into the hills’
old oak and pine, September wades
up to its shoulders in milk. Waking

into midnight, boulders glisten,
quick waters fill with assignments
of lightning and ponds bleach out like sheets.
Swishing silver in breezes the trees
sway lightly into the west. Except

for one leaf, one sagging palm of sugar
maple bending down from the prayer
and perch of a mantis that watches and waits
to pounce on third shift foragers.
And then he sees, emerging from creek

bank muds, a digger wasp in hunt
of larvae in which to suckle her brood.
She rises ragged up and into
the air. Her legs are trampled stems
beneath her. Fumbling through the leaves

she never sees his bent shadow.
Black angles thicken above her. Arms
unfold their spikes. They tear and crush
her, then raise her as if in supplication
to a moon already filling with bats.

Matt Miller