Appalachian Ground
Lisa Creech Bledsoe
More poetry, wildflowers, and mountain at
AppalachianGround.com
Copyright © 2019 Lisa Creech Bledsoe
All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
I. Property of Salamanders
Call the Mountain
Night Message
Broken Into Wholeness
Emotional Clearing
Song of the Spring Beauties
Winter Love Poem
Found
Slough Stone
New Things Born
Siege of Crows
Scarlet Elf Cups
Advice
Night Work
II. Hive Songs
Rescued
Listening For My Life
Neighbors
Bluebells
Blueberries
Haven
To My Crow Friends
Winter Hive Song
3 am, The Cats Want In
Vixen
One Thing Becomes Another
Imperial Moth, Adrift
The Ladies
III. Star-Swallowing
Seven League Boots
Wild Tea
Bluebeard
Apologies
Star Rise
Earthsnake
The Dirty Shepherdess
Foundling-bird
Leaving
The Mute Swans
All Night This River
Five Maps
IV. The Storm and Home of Us
Cabinet
Released
The Storm and Home of Us
Cherry Tree
The Church and the Wildflowers
Hit and Run
Boxes
The Offering Tree
Ablaze
Moving Stones
One Year
V. Maps of Light
Clearing the Seep
To Life
Spider Flight
Ode to Brown
Stuck
Thresholds
On the Last Small Bouquet of Gentian and Boneset
Riptide
There Will Be Days
The Same House
Measured
Begin Again
I. Property of Salamanders
Call the Mountain
Call the mountain, and she will come
with green-shadowed hawk
and salamander
Feel the land drop away from your feet
and fly
the song of all things, even
wild cherry in August,
bear sign and
the praise of bees
Call the mountain, and she will billow
in on thunder and
white slants of knife-rain
You will be a vixen bolting
for her hole,
the scent of lightning
stinging her nose
Ask the mountain to attend you —
this thing can be done, and will
with savage gravity
and the ordinary hush of moss on stone
She will adjure you to
the work of the land
You will be wind-seethe of grasses over balds
benedictions of the vireo
ghost of elk and red wolf
Then
you can let your leaves give up
and fall
Night Message
The same darkness rises above every house, and the same great moon. I have set out across the field to ask what music is left in the season, to let the hard white starlight blink out its flashlight message.
Lying on the earth, I listen to the ticking of the weeds until my body is filled with gray night clouds; in the nest of dirt and leaves between my collarbone and ribs hums the small wild mink of my heart.
Maybe we are here because it was our plan, or maybe we were called here by the deep green song of owls, or the flickering wing of a cabbage moth. Either way, the past breaks open and ghosts move along our paths.
Here is a thing worth doing: Let your thoughts be turned under like a garden at the edge of winter. Heap wet black leaves and compost over your spirit to encourage whatever gifts and riddles will grow there in secret.
Much has died and is gone, but like the two of us, the wild violets will grow their white bones and threads all winter in the dark forest soil.
Broken Into Wholeness
I waded into the creek today
to sling blackening clots of leaves from the snags
I rebuilt my stone crossing
prying up rocks from the silt and minnows
and laying them like careful plans —
with a care for the black-shelled snails still attached
I am not ready for summer to end
The water is still warm and the color of tea in the sun
but the creek bank is lined with yellow leaves and
puffs of milkweed
the bleached skeleton of a possum or raccoon
Everything is larger than we are:
the current, the seeds, the bones
To give our full attention is to be broken into wholeness
Emotional Clearing
Today is a good day to rearrange your emotional furniture.
Better yet, drag that chest of drawers — the one filled with neatly-folded grudges, tangled slights, clumped frustrations — out of the room of your heart.
Shove it off the porch and let it crash its way down the mountain and into the startled woods.
A year from now, or ten, it will surprise you as you wander through your inner forest. A mouse will have made a home in every drawer. Wrens will have woven your old insecurities into their nests, and honeysuckle will have turned your grief into fragrant cups for bees.
The glass knobs from each drawer will long have come loose and tumbled into streams, dazzling the salamanders with sun-sparks and rainbows. Your anxieties and unforgiveness are leaf litter.
Do this each year, and lay afterward on the open expanse of sun-drenched hardwoods in the home of your soul
and breathe.
Song of the Spring Beauties
I intended to try them this year
foraged and harvested wild
enjoyed in a salad, or cooked
And in March they emerged in thousands,
scattered drifts of pink and white like
confetti at a wedding
their tiny round roots — fairy potatoes! —
a flow of elfin river pebbles under the rimy mulch
After a dragging winter, how bright
these fair faces flushed in the rugged wind
their rosy stems and green leaves glowing
An unrestrained anthem
on a muddy, frozen mountain at
the end of the firewood
the end of bleak sky
and shivering
Seven years
it takes for each bloom to rise
from seed to rousing chorale,
ripened beauty
I went warm-wrapped with bucket and trowel
but gazing out, became rooted:
an antiphon in celebration of this
slow mastery and small wild praise
You and I need these here — all of them! —
feeding the psalm of the world
Winter Love Poem
Walking up the mountain together in the watery sun we saw two bright male cardinals and a small, fast female.
We watched one energetic Romeo pursue his intended. He flickered and dipped, following her with zeal through the tangle of bare apple branches.
The other male sat glumly in the briars. We walked right u
p, our hearts laughing and sore at the same time. “Get in the game!” you called. “Take it from me; if you don’t try, you can’t win.”
I love the way you can so easily throw open the windows of my heart under a winter sky.
Found
Sometimes you are chosen
by what you have not sought.
The boundaries meant to contain you
are upended by a thousand years
of hard frosts and soaking rains.
Every green and black summer —
every dragonfly drifting over swamp milkweed
remembers the things you weep for.
Your griefs and wounds are kept in soft mud, then
folded into the crease of the mountain
recorded in slate, schist and quartzite.
The unfurled universe claims you and
presses down her favor.
The white spruce will never forget your name —
he spells it again and again in unhurried syllables
each taking years to sigh.
The wrens and veeries will sing
down the darkness creeping up your twigs and ligaments, and
you can not be unhealed.
There’s no escaping this.
You cannot tell the fiddleheads to rise but not unroll
or remonstrate with the roots of yellow violets
gathering their strength for spring.
Your platelets and spinal cord
your salty bones and neurons
are the property of salamanders and colona moths.
You have so amazed the blue crawdad that
she has spun you into bright embroidery for the seep
and that isn’t done quickly
or without effort.
You are a map of light, a river of electric charge,
juice and gravity and tectonic plates shifting
the voice of a thousand bells.
You belong to all the earth and even more.
Open palms or clenched fists
bowed head or raised
the blessing will find you
and when your resistance is finished
it will carry you tenderly home.
Slough Stone
in the fragrant bowl of the slough
wanders a path I carved
into the steep shoulder of the mountain
down to the end, turning
then a long walk straight into the middle
through all that loves the wet, sodden
loves the sliding mud
to the tree bridge, which you must cross
to get to the other rim-path and out
ahh! the tree bridge
one ragged root-end on the firm
a stretch across the slickery stream bed
to the branch end in the redolent, mud-glut center
the branches are all rotted and gone and
in several places the log is half slunk in mire
no matter what
your boots are going to get sloggy and wet
but I have in mind — my secret! —
to carry an ample, weighty stone
to the middle of the slough
a thundering mother stone
lush with lichen
splendid and wide-hipped
enough to offer a lift
over sludge and muck to the log
it takes a while to find the right stone
again some time to debate
and look some more
before prying the winner —
the most fair and exquisite rock you ever loved —
from the fist of the mountain
and (this is the crazy part)
tipping it
on edge
somehow
steering or...
(watch your feet)
getting it down (surely not up!)
the mountain without
losing hold or getting (much) injured
then wrestling, of course
the runaway stone
from wherever it lands
hauling by pure stubborn and rope
to the path, the end, the center
smearing sweaty hair back
hands and haunches aching
but
what
a stone!
the matchless ally to lay before the log bridge
a muddy, scraped offering
(which has gouged a ragged path) but
a splendid step (just think of it!)
until
the sinking
digestive slough
claims this mass too
and tree...
but not yet!
you must
my friend
be willing to entertain reveries
on your mountain
of the biggest, most sublime stone you
can almost hold
convince everyone
to help you in your labor of love
ignore words like absurd or pointless
revel in the artistry of your choice
the perfection of your calling
the way you two found each other
then make a thousand journeys
a hundred thousand steps
together
while you can
New Things Born
The coffee-colored creek
is foamed with white this morning
the mountains wreathed in leagues of silk
In this damp coolness
this place where the sky rises and
the earth yearns to follow
new things are being born
Trees have begun to drop their seeds
to the sodden ground
Hard green buckeye husks are turning dark and soft
I know less than the water strider
less than the crawdad turning in the clay
but I know this
From root to crown we are changing
Siege of Crows
I was dimly aware of the crows as I climbed. They vexed and scolded and beat the air with wing claps as I made my way up the switchbacks.
At the top they were seething in one of the great boundary trees for no reason I could see. The understory is more open at the ridge top; the deer den down below where there is cover. Up here there are only the venerable trees and yellow violets in sun-shot gloom. And today, a siege of crows.
As suspicion arose in me I stopped moving, feet stitched to the ground, breath frozen. The birds nettled and spewed.
Suddenly a murky shape exploded from behind a beech and launched itself across my path and down the mountain, contours blurred with speed and unmistakeable power.
For a moment, I knew the scent of a predator and my small rabbit heart seized with clarity.
You carry the mark of blessing. You have brought the tender creature you are to the wild place you were called. You cannot be here unfaithfully, no matter what you think.
You walk in light, trailing shadows and roots.
May the damage you’ve done to yourself fade like the deer’s hoof prints in the muddy slough: they fill with water, glint a moment in the sun, then disappear.
Go now in peace.
The crows fell gradually silent, shaking down their feathers and staring at me, trembling in the wake of the coyote.
Scarlet Elf Cups
Below curtains of fog and sullen rain
a spore sinks its creamy fingers into the crumbling rot
and blooms in the black slough.
As if a grinning sprite has overflown
and dragged her sparking feathers in the sludge
with no other thought but playful delight
without even opening her eyes but here!
and here! and hidden here
the scarlet elf cups erupt
and lay winking in the mire.
You should hunt them too.
Lace up your sturdy boots
call up the cats and go into the woo
ds
and fill your eyes with secret rubies.
Who else in your life will venture out in the muck
and find treasures no one else will see?
Will your ghost go, when you have failed to live?
Go before it’s pleasant and warm.
Hope for once for a dismal rain —
days and shivering days of it, if you can.
Be greedy for the days and places no one else chooses.
Look especially for dying trees still standing
piles of sticks softening with decay
and tangled, rotting weeds.
That’s where your soft scarlet gifts will wait for you
each one glowing.
Advice
“That’s nice, darling.”
If you have an inner saboteur, this is what she tells you. Sometimes you’ll be hard-pressed to discern the sub-surface malice.
“…But maybe you should leave art to the artists.”
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