by James Still
The hounds wind the mountains round with wild hooting,
Stern tracking, and tongue-long panting,
Until the rotted darkness falls from bony shouldered hills
And doves moan low, moan long and lingering.
Foxes taking Defeated Creek
Hitty-o, ditty-o, dell,
Foxes taking Defeated Creek,
Hound dogs lazier’n hell.
Foal
Proud the smooth head within this April air
Tosses in gladness on the ambling winds
Thrust with returning birds. Shy-eyed and fair,
And turned in wonder toward the meadowed space
Between the whorls of branches and the simple leaves
New-budded, he has come upon this place.
He has come upon this place with limpid eyes
Moist in questioning. Never were hills so green.
Never before this season more wondrous skies,
Or earth more yielding for his hoofs to pass.
His is the timid quest with spindling clumsy legs.
He is the flesh of Spring returning with the grass.
Post Offices
Beefhide, Zilpo, Mouthcard, Stop,
Sideway, Redash, Spoutspring, Drop,
Select, Tobacco, Eighty Eight, Dimple,
Seventy Six, Soldier, Threelinks, Sample,
Gad, Gabe, Wisdom, Zag, Weed, Speck,
Stepstone, Bigbone, Snap, Bent, Keck,
Bromo, Blackjoe, Sip, Honeybee—
How many are in Ken-tuck-ee?
Earth-Bread
Under stars cool as the copperhead’s eyes,
Under hill-horizons cut clean and deft with wind,
Beneath this surface night, below earth and rock,
The picks strike into veins of coal, oily and rich
And centuries-damp.
They dig with short heavy strokes, straining shoulders
Practiced and bulging with labor,
Crumbling the marrow between the shelving slate,
Breaking the hard, slow-yielding seams.
Bent into flesh-knots the miners dig this earth-bread,
This stone-meat, these fruited bones.
This is the eight-hour death, the daily burial
In a dark harvest lost as any dead.
On Troublesome Creek
These people here were born for mottled hills,
The narrow trails, the creek-bed roads
Quilting dark ridges and pennyroyal valleys.
Where Troublesome gathers forked waters
Into one strong body they have come down
To push the hills away, to shape sawn timbers
Into home-seats, to heap firm stones into chimneys,
And rear their young before splendid fires.
And Troublesome floods with spring’s dark waters,
Dries to sand in summer, and purple martins
Flock to poled gourds, molting stained feathers
Which fall like blackened snow on clapboard roofs
Of hill townsmen biding eternal time.
And men here wait as mountains long have waited.
Interval
After the silent and the stalwart go,
Pale with their journey to the flagrant stone,
Palsied hands shall bring the dead oak low
Long after the nesting eagles have flown.
After the sky has crushed the mountains down,
Cleaving the blade of ridges into dust,
When all high earth yields up its mortal crown
To matted root, the ax and plough to rust
And wait with battles lost, dull laurels won
Marked with the blood that stained the ancient clay,—
A slender candle melted and undone,
A shadow martyred on a darkened way,—
There will be yet the beauty time can spend
In sightless blowing down a vagrant wind.
Graveyard
Nothing has moved in this town.
Nothing at all. Only the soundless dark
And the wonder of night that came like wind
Unseen have wandered down these final streets.
Only the silent have come upon this mark.
There is no town so quiet on any earth,
Nor any house so dark upon the mind.
Only the night is here, and the dead
Under the hard blind eyes of hill and tree.
Here lives sleep. Here the dead are free.
Tracks on Stone
A man’s shadow is a pebble of dark where the hills
Throw their earth-heads toward the sun;
The scatterings of his tracks are wasted and lost,
Grass-eaten and gone as light’s broad lumbering shoulders
Swallowed by the dark.
After the feet of man
The mares have wandered the hanging slopes,
The stallions whirled in a rain of heels, and the cups
Of the foals’ hoofs brushed the steepening paths:
The swinging ox has beaten all the narrow trails
Into shifting dust; the ewes and rams, the feeding wave
Of lambs, clouded the certain print of man’s small step.
The ways we go have held no kinship with this land.
Our tracks are fallen leaves that rot and blow apart
And are no more than fog within a shaded cove.
No track on stone, no step can stay. Only the centuries
Bound in our hearts can tread a deathless way.
Coal Town
These stark houses hung upon the hills,
The ragged slopes and interstices of the barren rock
Are havens for miners in an upper world.
Here is their pool of daylight and their stars
Waiting after darkness in the gutted cave
Emersed in coal and slate and flickering gleam.
A sweeter dampness rises from the river’s flowing
Than leaks from the black caverns of the earth,
And the ear here turns to man’s firm laughter
And the long clear whistle of the cardinal singing.
Fiddlers’ Convention on Troublesome Creek
In the night’s dark clover, in the burnt wood shadows
And whitened thrusts of hard long furls of moonlight
The fiddlers have wound the sullen ridges down
To Troublesome’s fork, to the cross-hatched mountain valley,
With wind nibbling their sleeves, brushing the stubble
And rattling the martins’ gourds and purple feathers.
And the men are lean, and their nags are leaner still
Than the rick-poles in the fields, the high rail fences
Hemming the patches of hoe-turned slanting earth;
And the fiddles are weaned with long silent hunger,
The dull strings slack, and fire of song unstruck
In the wooden throats and hollowed dusty bosoms.
O fiddlers, play life’s hardscrabble,
Play soot-winged bats in the damp green coves,
Saw with your bow till the strings scratch gravel,
Till glad tongues sing in the beechwood groves.
Foxes scratching in the family graveyard,
Hound dogs baying at the blighted moon,
Bull frogs sharpening their tongues with croaking,
Lonesome doves moaning the day too soon.
On every fork and trace the willows are shedding
Brief blossoms in downward flight to scattered sand,
To breathing waters quiet against the stone;
And the banjos sleep, the guitars lie unstrung,
The dulcimers rest in ash dust on the mantel’s breast,
And their songs are perishing from the shaggy hills.
O fiddle the moon and the star-tails flying,
Fiddle the dead in their earth-long sleep,
Sing the day breaking, the sun-ball dying,
Fiddle me to laught
er, fiddle me to weep.
Journey Beyond the Hills
The wind-drawn manes
And supple knees of the stallions fly the gate
Of hills to smooth meadows beyond the mountain wall;
And the strong mares drink in quivering haste
From the limestone waters, turning their anxious heads
Toward greener shores of grass, toward clattering passings
Of the fleet and proud.
Down the mountain lanes,
Down the heavy-hipped ridges stricken and unforested,
They have gone with the streams unhalted and draining
The narrow valleys of the flesh of earth.
O slow the hand and fleet the hoof upon the mountainside
Where men within their prisoning hills have stayed.
Swift are their hearts upon this journey never made.
Rain on the Cumberlands
Through the stricken air, through the buttonwood balls
Suspended on twig-strings, the rain fog circles and swallows,
Climbs the shallow plates of bark, the grooved trunks,
And wind-pellets go hurrying through the leaves.
Down, down the rain; down in plunging streaks
Of watered grey.
Rain in the beechwood trees. Rain upon the wanderer
Whose breath lies cold upon the mountainside,
Caught up with broken horns within the nettled grass,
With hoofs relinquished on the breathing stones
Eaten with rain-strokes.
Rain has buried her seed and her dead.
They spring together in this fertile air
Loud with thunder.
Dance on Pushback
Rein your sorry nags boys, buckle the polished saddle
And set black hats aslant the wind down Troublesome,
There are doings on Pushback at Gabe Waye’s homeplace
And the door hangs wide, the thumping keg bubbles
With gonesome plumping in the elderberry patch;
The cider brew strains against red cob stoppers
And the puncheon floor is mealed for the skip and shuffle,
Ready for the stamping, waiting for the hopping,
The Grapevine swing, the ole Virginie reeling
In the grease lamp’s fuming and unsteady gleaming.
There are jolly fellows heading toward Pushback
In the valley’s brisk breathing, the moon’s white bathing,
In the whippoorwill’s lonesome never-answered calling.
Gabe Waye has six fair young daughters
Who dance like foxfire in dark thickets,
Whose feet are nimble, whose bodies are willowy,
As smooth as yellow poplars in early bud,
And their cheeks are like maple leaves in early autumn,
And their breath as sweet as fresh mountain tea.
Gabe Waye has six full-blooming daughters
With dresses starched as stiff as galax leaves,
Awaiting the dancing, awaiting and hoping.
Rein-up the filly boys, hitch-up the stallion
And heigh-o yonder toward Pushback Mountain,
The katydids a-calling, the hoot-owl a-hooting,
Thick hoofs are striking fire on the crookedy trail,
For feet are yearning for the heart-leaf weaving
And a sight of Waye’s daughters doing the Fare-you-well.
Gabe Waye has three tall strapping sons
Standing six-feet-five in wide bare feet,
And with handsome faces where laughter’s never fading,
And with swift limber fingers for silver strings twanging.
The tallest picks the banjo, the thickest saws the fiddle,
The broadest plays the dulcimer with the readiest grace,
And the three together set the darkling hollow ringing
While the harmony goes tripping over moon-dappled hill.
Spur-up the nags boys, the dance won’t be lasting,
Tighten up the reins and set the pebbles flying,
Heigh-o to Pushback with a quick lick-a-spittle,
Night will be fading and moonlight dying.
I Was Born Humble
I was born humble. At the foot of mountains
My face was set upon the immensity of earth
And stone; and upon oaks full-bodied and old.
There is so much writ upon the parchment of leaves,
So much of beauty blown upon the winds,
I can but fold my hands and sink my knees
In the leaf-pages. Under the mute trees
I have cried with this scattering of knowledge,
Beneath the flight of birds shaken with this waste
Of wings.
I was born humble. My heart grieves
Beneath this wealth of wisdom perished with the leaves.
On Redbird Creek
Now all of earth that fills the valley’s breast
Is turned in furrows, and the ram’s horn rots
Where cloven soil has penned the acres up
With greenness prim and ordered into lots.
And all of oak and lynn that strode the west
Of Redbird Creek where crows and blackbirds call
Are things of mist grown stark and tall.
The vibrant canes crowding marshy ground
Are tuneless pipes heard by bleeding ears
Through blighted chestnut cankered to the heart
And rousing all of memory’s ancient fears.
These foils of clouds that men and plows attend
Are tares and thistles strewn upon the wind.
Pattern for Death
The spider puzzles his legs and rests his web
On aftergrass. No winds stir here to break
The quiet design, nothing protests the weaving
Of taut threads in a ladder of silk:
He is clever, he is fastidious, and intricate;
He is skilled with his cords of hate.
Who can escape through the grass? The crane-fly
Quivers its body in paralytic sleep;
The giant moths shed their golden dust
From fettered wings, and the spider speeds his lust.
Who reads the language of direction? Where may we pass
Through the immense pattern sheer as glass?
Yesteryear’s People
Death was their challenge, death the swift ax
Striking the timbers low in damp green coves
Within the mountain’s shadow;
Death the last quiet courage of a stricken heart
That fiddles praised, lean dulcimers moaned
When men went down with brave disdain to die
Upon the hill’s breast pressed beneath the sky.
And Troublesome’s dead are quartered with the roots
That split firm stone and draw the marrow out
And finger yellowing bones that lie astray,
Freed from design, released from life and death
And all of light and darkness, and the disarray
Of pathways in a brush-choked wood—
Only the hills are marked where they once stood.
A Hillsman Speaks
There ought to be a law!
Poets should write about people with breath in their bodies,
And about things men work for and find some use,—
Say, a big greasy dish of ham and eggs,
A shoat with a dozen suckling pigs, foals mulling at the teats,
And men scratching a living out of these hills.
Or, if a poem needs beauty,
What would beat a team of mules with a new harness
Showing a bit of brass, and a brand new green wagon?
Poets are homebodies, house-cats with inky fingers.
A man’s place is to move things and stretch his muscles,
To plow, and hoe, and scythe, to feel dog-tired at night.
If a man feels a poem coming on he ou
ght to fetch an ax
And cut a grandpap oak, popping chips out a foot wide.
That will make him relish his victuals
And swallow his rhymes.
Spring
Not all of us were warm, not all of us.
We are winter-lean, our faces are sharp with cold
And there is a smell of wood smoke in our clothes;
Not all of us were warm, though we hugged the fire
Through the long chilled nights.
We have come out
Into the sun again, we have untied our knot
Of flesh: We are no thinner than a hound or mare,
Or an unleaved poplar. We have come through
To the grass, to the cows calving in the lot.
Hounds on the Mountain
Slow the dull fulcrum, slow the arched leanings
Of hill on hill and witless lifting of stark eyes
To craven stone. White the wet lattice of morning
Over dusty drums, and keen the agony of dry roots
Questing beneath the earth.
Lean as brown straws
The hounds of day tread out thickets of darkness,
Damp the grasses their bodies have brushed in passing,
Thinner than fly-wings, heavier than words in a cavern,
Wilder than thoughts creaming the tongue unspoken.
Hounds on the mountain . . .
Grey and swift-spinning, the quarry shall turn
At the cove’s ending, at the slow day’s breaking,
And lave the violent shadows with her blood.
Horseback in the Rain
With rain in the face
And leathern thongs moist
In the hands, where halt
The mud-scattered journey
For the crust, the salt
Of bread upon the tongue?
Where turn from the flow
Of day slanted greyly
Toward earth, toward the dark
Shaken upon this rank of hills?
