Appalachian Heritage

So all I have are snatchesof a dream I can't remember:roads drawn as if by fingersin the dust, hills with sun-stiff peaks.

Escape and tell the storythat you know, some ancestormust have said, but no one did.I'm still not sure if anyone

remembers it; that is to say:I don't exactly knowif my mother's siblings sneakedbeneath the honeysuckle bushes

by the rails to feel the humof coal trucks in their ribs.Whoever planted uswent underground, curetted light

from out the mountainside,and had none leftto write their history by.Still Mamaw traced the tracks

to work after my mother—seventh child of I-don't-know-how-manycame-and-went before— [End Page 110]

was born into a Sunday,Father's Day, and couldn'thear him say, "Just lookat that baby smiling at me."

That's how the story goes,what little of it I know.Come winter, shocksof snow like blown glass

banked the gullies. Help roselike a poltergeist. All the worldwent fickle, pony tired.That is to say what's left,

what comes to mind, is this:the bloodshot whitesof light-eyed men in darkrelief, their industry smeared

on their cheeks; the dreamysighs of dreamy girlsunsure why they can't chartthe map of stars they feel

they're made from.When the boulder fell(or the mine caved in,or when William Howard [End Page 111]

covered for a friend),the money wasn't thereto say it in the papers.Or, that is to say, Virginia

is for lovers, which wewere, but talk's not cheap.Who wouldn't wantto find our stone-cut eyes

trawling the church aisle,or sink into the cream-cool creekand pull the leechesoff each other's supple feet?

However it goes, we're tilled earthretching poppies; or, we're transplants,perennials adapted to the heat.We must believe in something—

call it tragic inevitability,or early-onset discontent.Maybe we've lost to history,(maybe it's just me),

but still something goes on,spangling the quiet dark. [End Page 112]

I have just enoughof instinct left to know

these signs of rain:an insect too routine

for memory flitssideways; a squirrel

reports his body'sarc into the greasy breeze

between a low stonewall and a shade tree.

The dish-pale sink of skysucks out a lottery

of robins worrying dirtwith pagan symmetry;

the drought-drunk grassunfurls like local fame.

A thin electric tremblecoils the navel;

the bulk of us forgeteach other's names. [End Page 113]

Old men sing themselvesto sunstroke in idling

vans, their grown childreninside buying out

of season vegetables. We treatour youth like succulents

on blistered windowsills,the memory of sustenance

enough for us. We keepflattening the dust, the way

a highway grinds the shadeto pulp, a longitude line

on a dry-erase globe.Insects dither the coughing

of our sleep, our parchedthroats spasming in heat.

At night, rapt in apnea,we repel the dreams

where we steep in a neighbor'stub water, retrace the peach [End Page 114]

grey ring of a strange body's drossso longingly with our toes. [End Page 115]