Where turn for the spark
Of eyes burnt warmly?
To the stone, to the mud
With hoofs busy clattering
In a fog-wrinkled spreading
Of waters? Halt not. Stay not.
Ride the storm with no ending
On a road unarriving.
With Hands Like Leaves
The hounds sleep well. It is not they who stir the fox
And fret the owl; it is I, wandering on quiet feet.
It is I upon this high land sharpened by the moon.
I have gone softly, I have seen small eyes burn white
In thicket-dark, and I have heard sleep-twitters sound
Where the mulberry sheds its caterpillar fruit.
This is not a mountain I walk upon. It is a ridge
Of sleep or death, a slope hung on a night-jar’s speech.
A child walks here with hands like leaves, with eyes
Like swifts that search the darkness in a perilous land.
He seeks a hill where living day shall stand.
River of Earth
The sea saw it and fled. . . . The mountains
skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs.
He drank the bright air into his throat
And cast a glance across the shattered thrust
Of hills: And he knew that of all men who slept,
Who waked suddenly, he least of all could name this thing
That held them here. He least could put the sound
Upon his tongue and build the spoken words
That all might know, might speak themselves, might write
In flowing script for those who come upon this place
In curious search, knowing this land for what it is.
But there are those who learn what is told here
By convolutions of earth, by time, by winds,
The water’s wearings and minute shapings of man.
They have struck pages with the large print of knowledge,
The thing laid open, the hills translated.
He least can know of this.
He can but stand
A stranger on familiar slopes and drink the restless air,
Knowing that beneath his feet, beneath his probing eyes
A river of earth flows down the strident centuries.
Hills are but waves cast up to fall again, to rise
Still further down the years.
Men are held here
Within a mighty tide swept onward toward a final sea.
White Highways
I have gone out to the roads that go up and down
In smooth white lines, stoneless and hard;
I have seen distances shortened between two points,
The hills pushed back and bridges thrust across
The shallow river’s span.
To the broad highways, and back again I have come
To the creek-bed roads and narrow winding trails
Worn into ruts by hoofs and steady feet;
I have come back to the long way around,
The far between, the slow arrival.
Here is my pleasure most where I have lived
And called my home.
O do not wander far
From the rooftree and the hill-gathered earth;
Go not upon these wayfares measured with a line
Drawn hard and white from birth to death.
O quiet and slow is peace, and curved with space
Brought back again to this warm homing place.
Court Day
They have come early into the town.
Dark as plowed earth the rising and the setting out
On the creek-bed road, down the stony waters of Troublesome,
Down the cold thin flowing, willow-dark and waking.
They have come early to Justice, following the water’s sound
Out of the beechwood hollows.
Why the dark journey? Was the landmark moved?
Perhaps it walked alone, wanting to stir itself
And rest slantwise upon another place.
Will Justice gladden your summer’s plowing?
The jury sits upon the bench.
The judge sleeps in his chair, and the noon-bright hills
Crowd the tall windows, spreading their enormous curtain
Against the light’s pouring, heat-waved and burning.
They have sat long upon the bench, with Justice droning
Out of a hornet’s throat.
Do not indict me. Let me shake your hand.
If the landmark wanders I shall take your part.
My testimony is sound. I swear by the hills,
By these eternal landmarks of the heart.
On Double Creek
I was born on Double Creek, on a forty-acre hill;
North was the Buckalew Ridge, south at our land’s end
The county poor farm with hungry fields
And furrows as crooked as an adder’s track.
Across the creek I saw the paupers plowing.
I can remember their plodding in the furrows,
Their palsied hands, the worn flesh of their faces,
And their odd shapelessness, and their tired cries.
I can remember the dark swift martins in their eyes.
Night in the Coal Camps
Cold yellow windows to the night, the trees
Frozen with dark, and eyes sleepless
Along rutted streets. Clear the sparrow words
Pierce thumb-latched doors; blowing they pass
Like field larks dustily through seeding grass.
Drawn faces on pillows, mouths hollowed in breathing
The unquiet air; and the million-tongued night tremulous
With crickets’ rasping thighs, with sharp cluckings
Of fowls under drafty floors. In the caverns deep
The picks strike into coal and slate. They do not sleep.
Epitaph for Uncle Ira Combs,
Mountain Preacher
So long on mountains he had looked,
All earth was dull that did not tower up
Into the sky.
So long upon the hills
Of faith his soul had calmly leaned,
He was a bulwark firm within his God,
A mountain rising high.
Nixie Middleton
I am alone and all the hills have eyed my sorrow,
And bird and fox have heard my breath along the slopes
Whistling your name. I have searched the brief green hollows
Of Honey Gap, of Seven Lynn and the cool beechwood cove
Of Dead Mare Branch, calling you down from every hill,
Calling my love. There were the hermit cries
Of birds that pricked the leaves and fell on spears of moss;
In Flaxpatch Hollow a mourning dove sang through the knobs
His sad young song, his a-coo-o, coo-o, coo-o,
With his mate lost and all his sorrow true.
I have gone up the lonesome valley where the whippoorwill
Sings his dark speech; up Sand Lick, up Carr’s clear waters
And the sixty-seven mile wandering of Troublesome Creek.
I have gone up to the graveyard on a laurel-thicket hill
Where my love sleeps. My love waits for me still.
Come Down from the Hills
And here again to the flight of leaves and birds
Through sky-space and the dusty stickweed bonnets;
Here to the pawpaw thickets lush with frosted fruit,
To the hills new in their silent wintering,
And the clean white mantle of snow new-fallen.
Come down from the hills when the days curl
Into early dark, when hours crowd the thick door
And slip through sill cracks to the bitter air;
Come when the hollowed ice has claimed the grass
And blown its breath across the haggard months.
The fox has writ its
passage on the frozen ridge,
The crows their feedings in the glassy sedge,
And iced white wings of death stalk in the coves.
Come down from the hills. O never know
The stark thawing agony of blood on snow.
Eyes in the Grass
A rusty grackle walks the apple’s bough.
He wanders through a green cloth of leaves
With back arched impudently, and pauses,
Plump-bodied and balanced, searching beneath.
There are eyes in the grass,
Eyes lying still beneath stalk and pod where doodles
Drill their earthen cones, and ants march in a forest
Of living swords.
I think that neither the grackle’s black eyes
Drowned in quivering stems, lost in wattled twigs
Of grass-trees. O I am lost to any wandering view.
I am a hill uncharted, my breathing is the wind.
I am horizon. I am earth’s far end.
On Buckhorn Creek
Under the grackle’s words, under the hard bead
Of the crow’s eyes, the foal is dropped, the furrows laid
With a new excellence, and the seed-roots grasp the clod
Through leaf-rib and the rotted weed.
These are the acres served with love and plow
Through drought and thaw and rain’s re-ordering;
This is a land down-leaning toward the wind
And terraced with wisdom from the cowbird’s tongue.
On dark acres of the mind no bird’s throat cries
The winter’s growing, the germinal leaf that dies.
Year of the Pigeons
In the year of the passenger pigeons
They came in a darkening flood, and the valley of Troublesome
Was heavy with sound. The soft gutturals of their cooing
Were harrows that raked the air and drowned the locusts’ thighs.
They came with a cloud of wings that thundered down the hills
And broke the forest with their weight of flesh. Here fell
A snow of dung, here oak and lynn were shaggy with their nests;
Here field and wood, the grain and stalk lost in a feathered hell.
The hollows of Troublesome Creek were glutted with pigeons.
They blew like wind through the trees, and the shuck-dry leaves
Flew from their scratching on the molding floor.
These were no crows flapping above a cornfield:
This was a fire that ran through patch and brush
Eating the milky nubbins, the tender shoots,
The leaf-hoppers, the cankerworms, and maggots of crane-flies
At the grass roots.
The red agate of the pigeons’ eyes was the color of death—
Death quiet upon a nest, death feeding her curious milk
From bulging crop, death hovering over pin-feathered squab
With whole-eyed glance upon an infertile egg
On twig-lined shelf: the male warming the oval bulb
Between his legs, squatting with drooping wings;
The female taking her turn upon this stubborn fruit
Of their mating. Death was the silence in the stricken yolk
Turning a living semblance to the trusting breast;
Death running with blood-red feet, with wind-bright eyes
Where wing is interleaved with wing and nest with nest.
Come to the hills! Come to the pigeon roost for plentiful flesh.
Come with clap nets, O come with hawk and buzzard to this feast
Upon the breasts of heaven. Prowl with the skunk and fox
To sever these soft throats; light up the stinking sulphur pots
In the night forest. O come with death’s long flail and pole
For this ripe manna. Empty the tree-cotes of their fledglings,
And pile and gather and carry away a dying windfall harvest
With blood-beads hardened in a thousand beaks.
Now have the pigeons perished, the flocking millions slain,
And all the quiet red eyes become a single glance of dust
Blown through the beechwood coves. Now has the winter’s rain
Swept down the simple nests, and now the boughs are still—
Flesh, wing, and eye devoured, a countless horde brought low,
And not a slate-blue feather blows on any hill.
Where the Mares Have Fed
Where the mares have fed in high pastures
The grass is cropped smooth to the sod
Hung upon the slopes. The slant herbage of the clouds
Have fed their hunger, and nourished the stirring foals
Doubled in swollen bodies.
Longer is day upon the hills, tenderer the grasses,
Stronger the winds that toss uncurried manes
Above the ridge and hollow.
Higher upon the earth
And free when the foals are straining
Toward these green hills islanded with sky and birth.
A Man Singing to Himself
They were a man’s words, a ballad of an old time
Sung among green blades, whistled atop a hill.
They were words lost to any page, tender and fierce,
And quiet and final, and quartered in a rhyme.
This was a man’s song, a ballad of ridge and hound,
Of love and loss. The words blossomed in his throat.
This was a man’s singing alone behind the plow
With a bird’s excellence, a man’s shagbark sound.
Now has day come immense upon the hills.
The hounds drop hungrily down the ridge,
And the fox has barked in worn defeat.
Foals shake damp manes in burning near-light,
And roosters crow. Light crowds the door
Swung outward, chilled hearths fire slowly
From slovenly coals. Night grovels on its knees—
Sun’s on the mountain. The suckling child
Mouths the swollen breasts, the foals nuzzle
The mare’s dark teats. Fog rises slowly,
Yawning the valleys, releasing hill and ridge.
Men have awakened. They have gone out upon the land
With night’s blunt wisdom dark within their eyes
And querulous day at hand.
I Shall Go Singing
Until the leaf of my face withers,
Until my veins are blue as flying geese,
And the mossed shingles of my voice clatter
In winter wind, I shall be young and have my say.
I shall have my say and sing my songs,
I shall give words to rain and tongues to stones,
And the child in me shall speak his turn,
And the old, old man rattle his bones.
Until my blood purples like castor bean stalks,
I shall go singing, my words like hawks.
Leap, Minnows, Leap
The minnows leap in drying pools.
In islands of water along the creek-bed sands
They spring on drying tails, white bellies to the sun,
Gills spread, gills fevered and gasping.
The creek is sun and sand; fish throats are rasping.
One pool has a peck of minnows. One living pool
Is knuckle deep with dying, a shrinking yard
Of glittering bellies. A thousand eyes look, look,
A thousand gills strain, strain the water-air.
There is plenty of water above the dam, locked and deep—
Plenty, plenty, and held. It is not here.
It is not where the minnows spring with lidless fear.
They die as men die. Leap, minnows, leap.
Morning: Dead Mare Branch
Our mouths are fresh with morning on the hills,
And sleep-washed bodies wake wi
th quickened thought
To sounds of day, to a new strain of words
Rising within our throats like soaring birds.
The winds are up, the coves blow green and cool
With woolly leaves, and catkins thresh the air
Now loud with rusty cries of crows in flight;
The day has come, the sun’s hot-eyed stare
Has quieted the sleepless wanderers of the night.
Light in our hands the ax splits the oak,
The plow blades glide unerring through the earth
And all the fields awake, and all our world is free.
Here is a day ridge-broken and apart,
This is a morning bright upon the heart.
A Child’s Wisdom
I had a child’s wisdom of a thick-hilled country.
Fat the land was, swiftly the seeds leapt from their planting
In leafrib mold, in shallow furrows of the hanging fields;
The sky was corn and cloud, and crow-flight slanting.
Squat are the hills to a man’s eyes.
The hungry acres stretch to their gullied ends,
And yellow-legged fowls winnow the partridge sedge.
Where the great leaves fell, where the sugartree bled slow tears,
A child’s safe knowledge perished of its years.
Banjo Bill Cornett
Singing he goes, wrapped in a garment of ballads,
And his songs are his own, and his banjo shaped
By his own skilled hands. This is his own true love
He grieves, these his winding lonesome valleys
Blowing with perished leaves and winds that starve
In the chestnut oaks, and these the deaths he dies.
His voice is a whispering water, the speech of a dove.
The banjo is a part of him, his waking and his sleeping;
It is his bread and meat. Here his heart’s peace lies.
It is his tongue for joy, it is his eyes for weeping.