Where I grew up, kudzu is inescapable.

At this time of year the trees along the highway stop being trees and they become big green shapes, as if someone threw a leafy tarp over all the oaks. Some of them look like other things, like oversized animals with a general shape but no real detail. Like looking at clouds miles and miles away that look like dragons or clowns or something. This is summer in the Southeast, where kudzu is king.

Some people I grew up with actually found uses for kudzu besides “erosion control,” which it was originally brought to the region to help with. Some old ladies at the local flea markets would use the big rubbery vines to make baskets or other such things. Other capitalist ventures included using the blossoms to make kudzu jelly. It tasted a lot like grape jelly to me.

For me kudzu is inextricably linked to my formative years, so to speak. It was always there in late spring, summer and early fall. The vines drooping down over power lines, across bridges and fields. It can absolutely consume any car stationary for longer than 30 seconds. Some estimates say a vine can grow up to a foot a day.

All the mental snapshots of where I grew up have some amount of kudzu lurking in the background. I don’t mind it all that much, but I realized driving home from my folks’ house this evening that for me it has just become a part of what I am. But it’s kind of a bizarre relationship, because the vines really kind of frighten me.

Not in some horror movie, the-vine-is-going-to-eat-me kind of fright, but a shear chill from the sway it encompasses everything it touches. I’ve seen houses covered — and I mean covered — with this stuff. I keep a respectful distance from it because I just have to wonder — if I were to fall in to it, would I ever hit bottom? Nothing penetrates it. No light, no air, no movement. It just hangs there and grows. And grows.

It really is no small wonder, I guess, that one of my favorite authors wrote a fantastic poem about the stuff. James Dickey, who I feel has been overlooked in many respects, penned the poem “Kudzu” about forty years ago. For me it captures the essence of what it is to live among this weed.

Do any of you have anything like this from your travels in this realm? Is there something that is such a part of you that springs from the natural world?

Kudzu
by James Dickey
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 leafage
As though they would shriek,
Like things smothered by their own
Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts.
In Georgia, the legend says
That you must close your windows

At night to keep it out of the house.
The glass 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 mass 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 killed
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.