too) dogged them
Horse-drawn carts all the way to a pen up Cut-Throat Gap.
First they let out the buffalo gals, then after they settled down
Busted out the he-beasts, named after various Southern worthies.
But if Dan’l Boone and Varina Davis ever shared a
Lusty look of love, I never heard tell. I reckon
The train ride or thin air, one, took the rut out of ’em.
Soon the poor uprooted beasts starved
Or ran off or just plain petered out.
Some things even a millionaire can’t fix.
3
I was up Pisgah a fair amount, camped around a deadfall fire
When I could sleep on the ground without being sucked into it.
No poison oak past midway, clear water cold enough to crack your teeth,
Air smelled sharp as a falling axe. Red spruce and he-balsam
Big as smokestacks. You’d see eagles, snakes big around as your arm.
Papa said there was panthers, but I never heard one.
Pisgah springs head many a creek full of orange and black spring lizards
And mouth-melting speckled trout, pure waters that birth
Davidson River and the East Fork of Pigeon and South Hominy Creek.
I never have been more taken with a view.
Over a mile high, spy any direction and ask if Moses
Seen better when he looked from Gilead all the way to Zoar.
I kind of doubt it, myself. I like seeing chimney smoke
From Candlertown and Etowah, Brevard and Waynesville.
Promised land, for my people. And we got to go in.
4
Pisgah’s north side overlooks a valley filled with kinfolk
Intermingled two hundred years, Millers and Davises, Morgans and Israels,
Owenbys and O’Kellys and Greens, proud and stubborn as Germans and Irish
And Welshmen and Scots coiled like a clutch of winter snakes would be.
Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans and Catholics and Jews and I don’t know
What all else. Back yonder some of them helped runaway slaves
And draft dodgers jump the hollers for Tennessee and the road north.
Not long after the war, Jephthah Miller named a boy Ulysses S.,
Which takes a lot of sand, or a chip on your shoulder, one.
Old Jephthah wore out a stout Morgan girl, sired eleven young’uns with her.
His second wife’s Papa was Humphrey Posey Owenby,
Born when lots of boys got named after that old Baptist.
Reckon my mother thought reviving it would give me good luck.
Anyhow, South Hominy’s pretty country, settled by rugged people
Who didn’t care a hang for any kind of gummint.
Just wanted to be left alone at the mill or farm or store
In the shadow of the mountain my father said was mother to us all.
5
The mountain’s all changed now. Got sold, for one thing,
To the Forest Service, then the Parkway sliced across like a wounded snake.
They tore down Buck Spring Lodge about that time, too.
They must’ve thought Yankee tourists would haul it off
Board by board, rock by rock, and they may have been right.
They put a dern TV tower smack on top in ’54,
Sticking up there blinking red of a night like a whorehouse sign
Just so we could watch Mister Bill’s Magic Bus.
Between bad air in the fifties and sixties and them confounded bugs
You got to look hard for balsam or spruce pine now,
And there’s days you can’t hardly see Cold Mountain,
Much less Asheville. I ain’t been up in a while.
When all you see is Floridiots in flowerdy shirts,
Motorcycle men with ponytails, New Jerseys with yipper dogs,
Pouting kids listening to earphones, you don’t go back.
But down here, if you squint just right — and remember —
The tower goes away, the Rat still creeps, and you can almost
Hear an eagle scree before she dives — the Pisgah God meant for us to see.
This House
My father built this stout old place in 1914.
We lived in a tarpaper shack while he worked
On it. Moving day was like coming to a castle.
I was eight. I’m comfortable here yet.
Next move? Carry me out in a casket.
Papa was a scrounger — windows came from
A church they razed down at Luther, and its front step
Became the granite mantel over our fireplace.
Always was a comfortable house,
It sighs and creaks like it has opinions.
Me and Birdie remodeled in the fifties, put in
Pine paneling, central heat I’m too tight to use,
A new bathroom. Only thing I regret is covering
White
