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Waking. Ron Rash
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Green plush of bank moss, a smell
like after rain, and the creek
deepening behind the shed
where Nolan White spent his time
to wedge hours and seconds
out of time, free them to spill
out the open door as if
another current flowing
through the pool where I sank worms
to raise watery rainbows.
His one son had died, so now
he worked alone, making clocks
for Boone tourists. Once I laid
down my tackle, stepped inside
a moth-swirl of ticks and chimes,
at the center lathed chestnut
laid upon two sawhorses,
what Nolan White bent over,
hands dipping in, attentive
as a surgeon as he set
each gear in place. When it stirred
he brought me close, let me hear
that one pulse among many.
The Wallet
Knee deep in the Watauga’s
rock leaping whitewater,
my brother loses his balance,
his life if our father
doesn’t flail downstream
swimming air, running river,
tripping on stones to collar
his son, drag to a sandbar,
confirm with tentative fingers
his empty back pocket.
We pace back and forth on the shoreline,
down to the bridge, the other bank
before the sun finally falls
blurring the river in darkness,
my father not saying, don’t worry,
a life is priceless, not saying
something like that, not tousling
my brother’s hair and smiling.
For this is October. My father
believes he’ll be fired soon,
will face winter’s cold coming
without thirty-four washed-away dollars.
Myopia
They belonged to the mother
of my grandmother, removed
the morning she died, each lens
a clear coin, arms and rims
tarnished gold wire, folded in
their black velvet-lined casket
two decades, until I wiped
dust from each lens, let my face
look out a window to see
the world as she did, and saw
a gray blur become a barn,
apples emerge from green sleeves
of branches, and told no one.
Charley Starnes
After the woods a sudden
swoon of light in a clearing
and I am where I was then,
that summer morning I brought
food to Charley Starnes who drank
rotgut whiskey so he might
douse the memory of gas
searing his lungs, the bullet
that almost opened his heart.
Say sir, my grandmother said,
gave me the tin of biscuits,
mason jar of soup before
I walked the fence line and through
the woodshed’s board-gaps watched him
sway back and forth before flames
that seemed fueled by his curses,
and what burned inside the drum
I never knew, but left all
I’d brought on the porch, then fled
the place where six months later
sleeve or shirttail dipped too close
and Charley Starnes wore a suit
of flames through barbed wire, into
a corn field where they found him
face down like a felled scarecrow,
shattered stalks marking his swerve
and lunge through rows as though
a man trying to dodge fire.
Watauga County: 1959
On Clay Ridge a crescent moon
balanced itself, soon became
an open parenthesis
no father, uncle could close
as we hunched on farmhouse steps,
wore Sunday clothes days early,
what conversation the rasp
of matches. Small blades of flame
rose to faces no tears marked
as I heard silence widen
like fish swirls on a calm pond,
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