“There Will Be Dancing”
A fiddle tune bearing, rough-shod,
the memory of the village:
sunlight on stucco,
leaf-plastered paths in autumn,
spectral sheep
in moonlight and bracken,
the lilt of the market tongue,
ancient beyond telling.
A fiddle tune bearing, sweet as fruit,
a memory of timelessness:
candles on narrow sills
marching each night through Advent,
a bowl of rose petals, peach
and orange and crimson,
garlic and lamb simmering
in a black pan,
kisses long enough for tasting.
All have returned, just here.
Listen. They come round again.
There will be dancing, too.
From "Green-Silver and Silent" (Bottom Dog Press, Ohio, 2012)
“Yew Piney Mountain”
For Doug Van Gundy
In the old fiddle tunes there is always a stream running – rocks and roaring cascades. In the best tunes, on the Yew Piney mountain, there’s a rising wind, a young girl’s whistling, a piper readying for battle. And someone’s on their death bed – true enough. And a cat is screaming, strangled with midnight desire – sure. And somewhere granddad is mumbling to himself – granted. But there are, as well, frothy backwashes and somewhere above, little grace-notes echoing within the bell jar of quiet. In the woods behind all this silver singing a child adventures through a swift-settling fog, the oak and hickories mute with secrets. There are no easy endings, and yet the pulse keeps ticking where the fiddler predictably returns the up-and-down ladder of seconds and days and years. The stream, of course, keeps speaking its many tongues, running syllables and notes loose and free over its ancient bed. But is it running with whiskey, or running with fire, or just now simply running with spring, icy on this first warm day, running only to run, to run away? From "Believe What You Can," Vandalia Press/West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV
“The Last Dog Dead”
In Memoriam: Larry Gibson
Soon the wind dropped and the snow began its lazy dance
filling the night with silence.
He lays a map under the single lamp.
Three cigarettes had gotten him this far.
He reached for the dog’s head without thinking dog,
without thinking reach, without thinking.
The blood was on the stairs and would not be forgotten.
He could dream the summer hills.
He could take the picture frame
and right it there on mother’s wall.
The dynamite had shifted it again – they were
on the near side of the mountain now.
The drag-line was sure to follow.
But this was February – a true blizzard brewing up outside.
Mother had moved. A trailer on Miller’s Run.
The grandkids would miss the farm.
With his bare hands he could think, he could reach,
reach down his shot-gun.
That dog had not been the best he’d ever had.
She hadn’t been real smart but she had been a friend
before Massey’s thugs shot her.
Before Massey’s thugs shot her
the knoll had been anchored by the old cemetery.
It was gone now, too. Hardly anyone knew about that.
Bulldozer pushed it into the valley-fill in less than a morning.
The snow keeps falling.
The silence was good, was rare, and wouldn’t last
longer than the storm.
He wasn’t really sure whose blood was on these shoes.
Maybe the dog’s. Maybe his own. Maybe someone else’s.
What he knew was he had a story to tell
and no one was going to listen until blood signed its name.
This is that story. It is about these mountains,
about how they die, about the blood
shed when the last light is turned off,
the last paycheck mailed,
the grocery boarded up,
the school closed,
the last dog dead.
From "All That Feeds Us: The West Virginia Poems," Quarrier Press, WV,
2013
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