James Dickey - Kudzu lyrics

Japan invades. Far Eastern vines Run from the clay banks they are Supposed to keep from eroding Up telephone poles Which rear, half out of leaf*ge As though they would shriek Like things smothered by their own Green, mindless, unk**able ghosts In Georgia, the legend says That you must close your windows At night to keep it out of the house The gla** is tinged with green, even so As the tendrils crawl over the fields The night the kudzu has Your pasture, you sleep like the dead Silence has grown Oriental And you cannot step upon ground: Your leg plunges somewhere It should not, it never should be Disappears, and waits to be struck Anywhere between sole and kneecap: For when the kudzu comes The snakes do, and weave themselves Among its lengthening vines Their spade heads resting on leaves Growing also, in earthly power And the huge circumstance of concealment One by one the cows stumble in Drooling a hot green froth And die, seeing the wood of their stalls Strain to break into leaf In your closed house, with the vine Tapping your window like lightning You remember what tactics to use In the wrong yellow fog-light of dawn You herd them in, the hogs Head down in their hairy fat The meaty troops, to the pasture The leaves of the kudzu quake With the serpents' fear, inside The meadow ringed with men Holding sticks, on the country roads The hogs disappear in the leaves The sound is intense, subhuman Nearly human with purposive rage There is no terror Sound from the snakes No one can see the desperate, futile Striking under the leaf heads Now and then, the flash of a long Living vine, a cold belly Leaps up, torn apart, then falls Under the tussling surface You have won, and wait for frost When, at the merest touch Of cold, the kudzu turns Black, withers inward and dies Leaving a ma** of brown strings Like the wires of a gigantic switchboard You open your windows With the lightning restored to the sky And no leaves rising to bury You alive inside your frail house And you think, in the opened cold Of the surface of things and its terrors And of the mistaken, mortal Arrogance of the snakes As the vines, growing insanely, sent Great powers into their bodies And the freedom to strike without warning: From them, though they k**ed Your cattle, such energy also flowed To you from the knee-high meadow (It was as though you had A green sword twined among The veins of your growing right arm-- Such strength as you would not believe If you stood alone in a proper Shaved field among your safe cows--): Came in through your closed Leafy windows and almighty sleep And prospered, till rooted out