Ron Rash

(Watauga County, 1895)

Two lovers out walking found
more than spring's promised blessing
...

If they had hair it was gray,
the backs of their hands wormy
currents of blue veins, old men
the undertaker believed
...

Bed-sick she heard the bird's call
fall soft as a pall that night
quilts tightened around her throat,
her grey eyes narrowed, their light
...

Some thought she had slipped, the plank
glazed slick with ice, or maybe
already cold beyond care,
drowsy and weary, bare feet
...

The lost can stay lost down here,
in laurel slicks, false-pathed caves.
Too much too soon disappears.
...

The night smoothes out its black tarp,
tacks it to the sky with stars.
Lake waves slap the bank, define
a shoreline as one man casts
...

Barbed wire snags like briars when
fence posts rot in goldenrod,
the cows are gone, the cowpath
a thinning along the creek
...

Between Wytheville, Virginia
and the North Carolina line,
he meets a wagon headed
where he's been, seated beside
...

Though cranes and bulldozers came,
yanked free marble and creek stones
like loose teeth, and then shovels
unearthed coffins and Christ's
...

Sometimes it only took a single word,
just a look if they had drunk enough.
A hawkbill knife would flash, sometimes a gun.
The doctor closed their eyes and it was done.
...

Mouths shackled, dead or dying,
the bluegills, rainbows and browns
dangled from shiny metal
my father had thrown like chain
...

As though shedding an old skin,
Fall Creek slips free from fall's weight,
clots of leaves blackening snags,
back of pool where years ago
...

The night Silas Broughton died
neighbors at his bedside heard
a dirge rising from high limbs
in the nearby woods, and thought
...