Violet Wood Sorrel, Oxalis violacea
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[ 3 poems from New and Selected ]
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Barbed Wire
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New strung, it sparks a live wire
when sun hits right, and can be
thumbed like guitar string, its tune
pure country twang, but given
enough time rain rusts metal,
fence posts wobble like loose teeth,
barbed wire burrows in laurel
and goldenrod before found
by fishermen or hunters.
As I found out once, deep in
the Smokies when something latched
to my calf—coil of old strands
not quite elemented back
into ground ore, and though I searched
no chimney-spill or hearthstone,
no sign but rusty fence-thorns
of one whose hammer tapped out
a claim on this land traveling
through bright lines from post to post,
traveling time to a moment
one man’s tenuous hold on
the earth snagged like memory
surfaced long after, time-dulled,
but still able to draw blood.
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Ron Rash
from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
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❀ ❀ ❀
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Plowing on Moonlight
I rose with the moon, left the drowsy sheets,
my nine months wife singing in her sleep,
left boots on the floor, overalls and hat
scarecrowing a bedpost so I could plant
my seeds with just a plow between
the earth and me, my pale feet deep
in the ridged wake where I labored,
gripped the handles like a divining rod,
my eyes closed to the few stars out.
All night I plowed, beard budded by frost,
chest nippled, my breath blooming white,
and felt in me the sway of the sea,
rain’s fall and soak, the taproot’s thrust,
the cicada’s winged resurrection.
I opened my eyes to dawnlight,
left my field and lay with my wife,
warming as I pressed against her body,
my hand listening to her waxing belly.
. .
Ron Rash
from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
. .
Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca
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❀ ❀ ❀
. .
The Exchange
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Between Wytheville, Virginia,
and the North Carolina line,
he meets a wagon headed
where he’s been, seated beside
her parents a dark-eyed girl
who grips the reins in her fist,
no more than sixteen, he’d guess
as the come closer and she
doesn’t look away or blush
but allows his eyes to hold
hers that moment their lives pass.
He rides into Boone at dusk,
stops at an inn where he buys
his supper, a sleepless night
thinking of fallow fields still
miles away, the girl he might
not find the like of again.
When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,
then backtracks, searches three days
hamlets and farms, any smoke
rising above the tree line
before he heads south, toward home,
the French Broad’s valley where spring
unclinches the dogwood buds
as he plants the bottomland,
come night by candlelight builds
a butter churn and cradle,
cherry headboard for the bed,
forges a double-eagle
into a wedding ring and then
back to Virginia and spends
five weeks riding and asking
from Elk Creek to Damascus
before he finds the wagon
tethered to the hitching post
of a crossroads stone, inside
the girl who smiles as if she’d
known all along his gray eyes
would search until they found her.
She asks one question, his name,
as her eyes study the gold
smoldering there between them,
the offered palm she lightens,
slips the ring on herself so
he knows right then the woman
she will be, bold enough match
for a man rash as his name.
. .
Ron Rash
from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
. .
❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
. .
Ron Rash will take you there. He will take you deep into to the forest where the unvoiced past may suddenly reach up from the earth and bite your leg. Into the night where moonlight unveils dreams and deep desires. Up a lonesome mountain holler where one of his own kinsmen once scratched to farm a living. Even deeper, farther, he will carry you into generations long grown cold but where a story of his early ancestor can still wring a warm and sudden smile.
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This collection, Ron Rash’s New and Selected, covers decades of his writing but hundreds of years of settlement and stories, of life and death in the southern Appalachians. Each poem is the flare of a match that lights a lantern to limn a face, a moment, another turning point in another life. A history book might teach you about the Tennessee Valley Authority and farmers displaced by lakes filling behind its hydroelectric dams, but these poems will teach your heart how it felt to live on that land and watch it go under. The poems will teach you that poverty in possessions is not poverty of the soul. They might teach you that following your God can still involve some wrestling matches. Most of all, these poems connect – they tell one expansive enlarging straggling and struggling story of people and families each one of us is a part of. We are a part of these stories if we call ourselves Americans, and especially Southerners. Or if we just call ourselves human beings.
. .
❀
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Ron Rash – POEMS, New and Selected is available at Bookshop.org.
. .
Also by Ron Rash at Verse and Image:
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Common Buckeye, Junonia coenia
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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
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. .
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– Bill
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