by James Still
Over Troublesome’s sudden banks hemming drifts of sand
Against slow thin water, against the mare’s stiff heels
Wheeling in the dry creek bed with casual step;
And the sun-pierced shade of willows settles unsteadily
Among the throng of stallions champing their bits
And straining new leather with arrogant heads.
High in their polished saddles the traders ride
With stinging lash and blunt spur deep against the side
Of goaded pony, of anxious filly swinging heavily,
Of spavined mare plucking heels with sharp precision
From bedding sand. Combed, curried, and clipped,
Their smooth breasts glisten, and long muscular necks
Rise clean and springy into tight bridles.
The traders measure with keen practiced glance
The height from withers to croup, feel trembling flesh,
Rub hard careless hands over quivering muscles
And peer coldly into moist sad eyes.
Only the foals toss unbound heads
With flash of hock and unsheared flowing manes,
Flexing clumsy legs in short unhindered quests
Down the aisles of sand to the hill’s uplifted girth.
An untamed heart is swift upon the earth.
Mountain Fox Hunt
Fox in the thorn-patch . . .
Shrill notes of a sheep’s horn billow down the hills
Crusted with shadows. Fetch the long rifle from the wall,
Draw ramrod and tallow-dipped rag through the slender shaft,
Awakening a dulled skill. Bring out the rusty bullet mold
With a finger of lead; blow a slow fire upon the cold hearth.
Shave the lead pellets to a good roundness ere the wildcat
Chills the night with his crying.
Call up the yawning hounds from the chimney’s warmth
Beneath the puncheon floor. Call up the dusty hounds
With a rasher of sow-belly and a greasy corn-pone
While fog loiters in the valleys and dark coves
Over blossoming elder and wine-red sumac,
And a swollen moon rides the sky-orchards.
Bright on the mountain the hunter’s fire strips darkness down
From quavering poplars fluting the night;
And slouched shadows wall the glow against a taller sky
Listening through the leaf-sounds. Listening:
The hills muffle the long crying; then suddenly clear
Over razor-back ridges comes a wild freshet of barking.
Hounds flow down the slope in a narrowing sweep
And up again in brown tidal strokes.
Their voices are the wild trumpets
Catching the night air for their blasting:
Thin, high-nasal, the young hounds with soft brown eyes
Burst into a stark tenor. Thunderous and earthy,
The bass-viol music of old hounds rends the damp air.
Gaunt and anxious, the swiftening pace
Flings the dogs clamoring down the trail
Where an odd prescience guiding padded feet shall fail
And a gum-stump mark the end of a perilous way.
In the stern interval when warm blood stains the earth
And the mellow banjos of the hounds’ throats are still,
A catamount cries the chilled and living day.
Infare
He was the sun-bronzed, resolute and free,
Who buckled his belt against the universe
And challenged the taut rope of mortality:
She, the sweet apples from high green orchards,
The faint grey line of day within a purple land,
The slender willow, the sudden piping voice,
A crystal from the flint-beds of the coves
Whose strength lay in the wildness of her choice.
The calloused hand that grasped the fragile one
Was burning daylight to a feeble star,
A smoking jut of mountains near the sun.
There were busy fiddles and elderberry wine,
And clumsy feet striking the boarded floor
With jarring notes that rimmed the flowing night.
There the ashy face and faded rheumy eye
Blushed and sparkled in the tallow light.
They fled outside beneath the walnut trees
Where a dead-white moon was roistering,
Drawing its beams in skeins across the shadow seas.
His eyes turned back against the wooded ridge
With lonesome glance upon youth withdrawn;
Her heart was quick to climb with breathless sigh
To blossoming orchards of familiar peace.
And mountains laid cold heads against the sky.
When the Dulcimers Are Gone
When the dulcimers are mingled with the dust
Of flowering chestnut, and their lean fretted necks
Are slain maple stalks, their strings dull threads of rust,
Where shall the mellow voice be heard upon the hills,
Upon what pennyroyal meadow, beside what rills?
Where shall the gentle words in mild abandon sing
With sweet design in loitering melody
As flights of swallows aimless on the wing,
Yet skilled as scythes that curve through yellow grain
And fragrant as jasmine after freshening rain?
Or may the heart’s breath on the slender reed
Sing bright virelays to match the oriole?—
The tulip tree the lyre that one must heed
When the dulcimers are gone, when afternoons attend
The silver underleaf of poplars in the wind?
Reckoning
They who are strong have claimed an earthly peace,
Gathering their strength in this treasured hour
When the winds hush, the muted waters cease,
And fog with misty wings has raised a tower
Of silence as a harbor for the stars:
When hills have cleft the sky with brooding peaks
Thrust in the purple bowl, raised solemn bars
Against all utterance, he who then speaks
Shall in this mighty breathlessness be heard.
They shall be heard, the weary and the spent,
The broken at the wheel, the fledgling bird,
Each grievous thought, each yearning here unspent
Shall have its reckoning when the hills confide.
They shall find strength where peace and time abide.
Heritage
I shall not leave these prisoning hills
Though they topple their barren heads to level earth
And the forests slide uprooted out of the sky.
Though the waters of Troublesome, of Trace Fork,
Of Sand Lick rise in a single body to glean the valleys,
To drown lush pennyroyal, to unravel rail fences;
Though the sun-ball breaks the ridges into dust
And burns its strength into the blistered rock
I cannot leave. I cannot go away.
Being of these hills, being one with the fox
Stealing into the shadows, one with the new-born foal,
The lumbering ox drawing green beech logs to mill,
One with the destined feet of man climbing and descending,
And one with death rising to bloom again, I cannot go.
Being of these hills I cannot pass beyond.
Death on the Mountain
No child he had
Nor any kin,
Only the cold
January wind
To speak the hopeful word
At death:
Two hound dogs
To cry his dirge,
And Troublesome’s tide
To sweep and surge
Over fevered brain
At death.
Only a fiddle
&nbs
p; Beside his bed
Brightening his days
Before life fled.
Only remembered song
At death.
Shield of Hills
Ewes’ first wool and linsey cloth
Shall line the grave box for this child,
And smooth-grained chestnut sawn and planed
Be his wooden garment for a while.
The earth shall rise up where he lies
With steady reach, and permanent.
A shroud of cedars be his mound,
This shield of hills his monument.
Uncle Ambrose
Your hair is growing long, Uncle Ambrose,
And the strands of your beard are like willow sprays
Hanging over Troublesome Creek’s breeze in August.
Uncle Ambrose, your hands are heavy with years,
Seamy with the ax’s heft, the plow’s hewn stock,
The thorn wound and the stump-dark bruise of time.
Your face is a map of Knott County
With hard ridges of flesh, the wrinkled creek beds,
The traces and forks carved like wagon tracks on stone;
And there is Troublesome’s valley struck violently
By a barlow’s blade, and the anti-cline of all waters
This side of the Kentucky River.
Your teeth are dark-stained apples on an ancient tree
And your eyes the trout pools between the narrow hills;
Your hands are glacial drifts of stone
Cradled on a mountain top:
One is Big Ball Mountain, rock-ribbed and firm,
One the Appalachian range from Maine to Alabama.
Clabe Mott
Arise from your rope-strung bed, Clabe Mott,
The sun rakes the fields, your farm stands fallow,
The mouldboard rusts, the plowstock stands upturned,
The harness falls in heaps within your sagging barn
And your stock runs free upon the brambled hills.
The beard is thin upon your face, Clabe Mott,
Your hands are slender as a willow’s bough.
How could your slim feet plod the furrows down?
How could you hold a mountain in your arms,
Or slay a forest with your papered hands?
Fetch out the fiddle, Clabe, draw the ready bow,
Let crabgrass march, let foxtail drown the patch,
Let dull-chains slacken, the poplars stand unhewn,
Forget the partridge in the fence-row thatch.
When you strike fire on your fiddle, Clabe,
The waters wait, the winds break their pace,
The corn grows tall, the shoat farrows young,
The foals race pasture with the golden mare;
Strong men wait, calloused hands go slack,
The oaks go down with thunder in the singing air.
The Hill-Born
They have come down astride their bony nags
In the gaunt hours when the lean young day
Walks the grey ridge, and cool light flags
Smooth-bodied poplars piercing a hollow sky.
They have come forth against the day’s down-curving
From wall-darkened beds where a child’s breathing
Flows beyond measure with the crickets’ chirping,
Or cicadas’ song in seventeenth year spawning,
Greeting the earth before the leprous mist
Melts in the sun’s bronze weaving.
They are uprisen with the strong and fleet
Whose footsteps weave no trace in aftergrass,
Forth with broadax and with adz and froe
Where forests edge the ancient wilderness,
To hew and flay among the patriarchs
And bring their strength and agèd glory low.
Upon broad hills their scythes are swinging,
In the high fields severing vine and stalk,
The blade’s arched stroke is wildly singing
A song echoing from earth’s dull throat.
A sweep of years will bring them all to lie
Wrapped in strange flowering of earth and sky.
Starveling trees bear so sweet a fruit
Along the shallow amblings of Squabble Creek,
Down the prisoned waters of Troublesome:
Spring tides surging to the naked root
Have carved a road for wheel and hoof,
And writ their passage on the living rock.
Down the broad hills earth-born lays are sung,
Sweet as a lark’s song whispered down the wind—
Never the free shall know a stricken tongue.
Aftergrass
In his last days he let the worn earth rest,
Unbridled his mare, loosed the sheep to graze,
Unleashed the hounds to run familiar paths
And turned aside from all his toilsome ways.
A little time for calm, for looking back
On the long furrows spread across the years,
On the lost faces, the young hands,
The eyes caught up within a glance of tears.
His was a quiet gazing on the hills.
He let the yellow days and seasons pass.
He shared with earth an unaccustomed peace—
After abundant harvest, the aftergrass.
Child in the Hills
Where on these hills are tracks a small foot made,
Where rests the echo of his voice calling to the crows
In sprouting corn? Here are tall trees his eyes
Have measured to their tops, here lies fallow earth
Unfurrowed by terracing plows these sleeping years.
Here flow the waters of Carr before his darkened door.
I cannot see you, child, but I can hear your voice
Shrill and imperious with rain in the beechwood trees.
In the dark hours I have heard your questing words
Creep out of nowhere in the mountain silence;
I have heard your small heart beat with low whispering
In measured breaths of deep night, ebbing and returning.
Now you are shod against the earth.
Once your eager toes were thrust with gladness in the soil
And smooth pebbles welled between your willing toes;
Once you waded the clear stony waters of Carr
And perch fled before your steps in swaying silver zigzags.
Once, waking in the night, open-eyed and wondering
You heard geese flying over, and you listened, breathless;
Once swift feet of horses echoed when your brother died,
Once the waters of Carr rose in the night to flooding
And you heard the swelling voice of the water’s strength.
Now you have fled with the geese, with the hoofs at midnight,
Swept with the waters down the winding mountain valleys,
Drifted into years of growth and strange enmeshment,
But the child did not go. . . .
He is waiting under the shadow of these hills,
In the damp coolness of laurel and rhododendron;
He is lost in the mossy coves, in the lynn’s late sighing.
His voice is drowned in the waters of Carr.
Passenger Pigeons
Here was a symphony of wings,
An aerial river of birds across the sky in thunderous floods
Of slate-blue feathers, a host of violet throats
Splitting the sky with one unerring thrust.
Here were red feet of pigeons spilling
Like blood through the trees, breaking the forest down
In their dense roosting wild with guttural cooing.
Here in this weight of wings were folded death and dust.
Farm
In the deep moist hollows, on the burnt acres
Suspended upon the mountainside, the crisp green corn
Tapers blunt to the fruiting tassel;
Long st
raight shafts of yellow poplar
Strike upward like prongs of lightning at the field’s edge,
Dwarfing the tender blades, the jointed growth;
Crows haggle their dark feathers, glare beady eyes
Surveying the slanted crop from the poplar boughs,
Opening purple beaks to cry the ripening feast,
And flow from their perch in heavy pointless flight.
A lizard, timid and tremulous, swallowing clots of air
With pulsing throat, pauses at the smooth trunk
And runs up the sky with liquid feet.
Fox Hunt on Defeated Creek
On Defeated Creek the night flows down the hills
And the foxes stir, the hounds pluck up their ears
In the hard dark shadows, in the webbed laurel thickets
Where the catbirds stir and scold the witless owls.
Call out your lousy hounds, boys,
Rouse out the pot and boodle,
Fotch out the lean lank hounds, lads,
Loose the bitch and scootle.
Stir fox, stir bat, stir the weasely doodle.
Foxes traipsing on Defeated Creek,
Hitty-o, ditty-o, dell,
Foxes sparking on Defeated Creek,
Knock wood, clank iron, ring bell.
The heavy-hipped ridges are leashed with pale fog’s binding
And the dark ivy, the green-stemmed eddying river,
Flows in leaf-waves over the root-sewn rock
And pinched white blossoms scud in threaded winding.
There’s a fox on Defeated Creek.
By gats his eyes are like double sunballs,
His fur ripe as moonlight boiling on a wheat patch,
His feet as soft as the sappy willow buds
And swift as August lightning.
Unwax your deafened ears, my lads,
Peel the husk from your rusty sight.
There’s fox hams smoking the moon-pied slopes
And fox-bark ringing the high-shanked night.
Where the blood-red gash of fruited sumac blooms
