SNOW ON THE MOUNTAINS

SNOW BREATH

Snow on the mountains.

Where did the wind go? I stand with my shawl

wrapped around me and listen.

Snow on the mountains.

The holly-pip red as a blood blister,

thorns reaching out to me.

Snow on the mountains.

Don't beg me to come back inside

lest I catch my death.

Snow on the mountains.

The river a hard road to travel.

My feet slide on ice cobble.

Snow on the mountains.

Gone south, I will say when you shout

from the riverbank.

Snow on the mountains.

Against my ear you held a conch shell once,

ask What do you hear?

So much snow on the mountains,

I hitched up my dress and ran home.

How could I tell you then,

hearing snow on the mountains

refuse to melt, that after so long,

a woman's soul searching

through snow on the mountains

will sink, out of breath, in the silence

of nothing more, nothing less.

From Black Shawl, LSU Press, written in response to an ancient Welsh poem, composed between the 9th and 12th centuries, in which the line "Snow On the Mountains" is repeated throughout.

PHACELIA, from BLOOD MOUNTAIN (BLACK SHAWL)

Quite a few years back I began a short story from the viewpoint of a young mountain girl "taken advantage of," as we say, by one of the timber "cruisers" sent into the southern Appalachians to scout the best stand of forest to be clear-cut. As in Ron Rash's novel Serena, these timber companies brought ruthless exploitation to the mountains. The story never made its way to completion, but the situation was echoed in a later poem, as part of the sequence "Blood Mountain," from my book Black Shawl. This sequence has been set to music for soprano and piano by my friend Harold Schiffman and premiered a year ago in New York City. It will soon be released on cd.






PHACELIA


Gently, as if swabbing
wounds, she scrubs
stains left from

where they lay down
in the grass. She remembers
her fingers plunged deep

into crushed green, the odor
of light rain, the moldering
leaves going up in a fever

of white flowers till she
can hear herself babbling
such words as forever,

forget-me-not, full
moon, her mouth
like a dovecote of syllables

forced open so she can
taste every sweet
nothing melting away

into silence as she lay
beneath him like trampled
earth already trying

to cover itself with a veil
of such snowy white
as what a bride calls (oh

why can't she hear
what she says?) Sheer
Illusion.

LETHA

LETHA

Now when she weaves,
she weaves everything blue
and not only because blue does
not reveal earth’s stain
as homespun left unlaved by larkspur
or indigo will. She keeps blue flowers
boiling all day in her dye-pots,
the bubbly-blue sap
of her fleece turning darker
and darker till she sees the Deep
churning under his ship
as he told it those nights
when his words held him close
to her, whispering he was the only
survivor. He flung his tales wide
as fishing nets in which she finds
herself still tangled, hearing
him liken her eyes to the harbor
lights leading the seafarer home
to a fair woman’s bed
where the coverlets
she has unwound from her loom
bear the blue names
he taught her to say like a charm
against doubt. She repeats
whem with each shuttle’s throw,
knowing someday she’ll sleep
under all Seven Seas of them,
sleep as the drowned women
he liked to sing about sleep,
having sunk so deep
into the blue,
blue repose of forgetfulness,
they need have no mortal
fear of the bottom.

--KSB

First published in Shenandoah: Appalachian Writers Issue

Cheri L. Jones, Poet

A few weeks ago I met Cheri Jones at a four-woman reading at Osondu Bookstore in Waynesville (see 8/24/08 post). Her reading from her recently self-published book moved me a great deal, and I am happy to present some poems from that book, CHAINS.

For more of Cheri's work, I'd encourage you to go to her website (just click above on her name). You may either order her book from her or find it at Malaprop's and Accent on Books. Or urge your local bookstore to stock it.

********

meet Red . . .



Red's world ended in a gunshot.

That's when everything began.

The day his Pop died shot,

little Red became a man.



Evil exploded, whistled, popped.

Shocked Red felt its fatal blast.

Their wagon shuddered, stopped.

His father's life passed, passed fast.



Red heard sweet Willie's anguished scream.

Time slowed. Strength melted away.

Neighbor Frost (in Red's dream)

turned his horse, then sped away.







bliss



A lone jay wings

across the hazefiltered pink of dawn.

You can hear moss

growing in the lingering gray damp.



Cling to this moment of ecstasy

as it changes in seconds

and disappears forever.







ruminations . . .



Maggie hugged her knees

wishing she could ride

a big ferris wheel

up into those clouds

(cotton candy clouds)

and sticky her face

with sweetspun pink fluff.



Maggie hugged her knees

wishing lots of things.

Twilight descended.

She listened tensely

to hushed bickering,

looking for fireflies,

waiting for fireflies.



Their yard was all mud -

no grass, no driveway.

Their car loomed large there,

a shadowy threat.

In the car time dies.

After a prayer at

eighty miles an hour,

the blurred world whirls by.



While Daddy bellows,

". . . and He watches me,"

his rough calloused hands

grab, hit, pinch, twist, bruise,

welt, humiliate.

Is Dan's God watching

when the car swerves on?