V E R S E and I M A G E

Hills are keening,

yellowed voices of serious photos

call me home to “precious memories,

How in a displaced caravan

we went to lay her down

in shining soil,

flecks of coal on shovels

in the hills of familiar gravestones.

It had to be that church,

that pastor’s family name,

Rock of Ages, Beulah Land.

How odd to call it home and feel it so

without a waiting bed of down

to follow the wake,

all of us gone north for good,

except for this.

How we walked between

the railroad and the shallow ditch

collecting tadpoles in a pail

we’d flush in the motel’s aqua bathroom

because I would not understand.

Death, a newborn slippery thing.

How the stone had to be a heart

to bear the name of Mother,

how the heart had to be a stone

to be left behind

in its rightful place

in the hills near the church

near the home place bought by strangers.

We packed the memories once again

in bursting overnight bags,

left the motel beds unmade,

because we could

and settled into our procession.

CB radios, Thermoses, Styrofoam,

we headed back up north

to our factories, unions, high schools,

without looking backward.

from Coal River Road, Livingston Press, The university of West Alabama; © 2013

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Where is home? Is it a house number, 1074 Marcia Road, a side yard, fence, and oak tree I can still see as clearly as when I was 10? I could walk right through the carport sixty years later and show you exactly where we buried my hamster. Or is home a garage full of cardboard boxes and bric-a-brac from four other homes of parents and grandparents, houses you only spent a few dozens of nights in altogether? Is home the towns those houses occupied? The states?  Whose home is your home? Whose place is yours?

I was barely four when we moved from Niagara Falls to Memphis. Not until years later was I able to piece together the stories of my parents’ migration, how they drifted together across those red clay counties of piedmont North Carolina, then pinballed via Atlanta to New York before birthing me. All my solid early childhood memories abide in those eight years in Shelby County, Tennessee, that little four-square subdivision on the outskirts of Memphis.

Then we moved. And moved again. The sixth graders in Delaware mimicked my accent and immediately nicknamed me “Memphis.” It doesn’t take long for a 12-year old to figure out how important it is to fit in. For the next couple decades I can now see that I lived as if the place I was staying would never be the place I stayed.

Here in the rural South, when you meet someone new question number one is not, “What do you do?” but, “Where are you from?” One longs to fit in; one doesn’t want to whack the conversation with an axe by replying, “New York.” I invented my stock answer right quick: “Both of my parents are from North Carolina.” Subtext: “I want to be from North Carolina. I want you to let me be.”

I have now lived exactly 70% of my entire lifespan in North Carolina. NC driver’s license, NC property taxes, kids born in NC, grandkids too. Maybe being almost from here is an advantage. Every new state park we visit, every historical factoid, every endemic flower species I learn, every third generation progeny of a friend I greet while out walking – I tally them all securely in my calculus of belonging. Way back when Linda and I arrived in Durham a week after we’d married, a month before I started med school at Duke, we just assumed that in four years we’d be moving back to Ohio to be closer to her huge family. Now it’s been fifty-one years in The Old North State, forty-four of those in rural Elkin in rural Surry County. Lately we’ve started talking about downsizing, moving somewhere we can age in place through to the end of our allotted spans. Linda says, “You know where I’d really like to live?” Oh my God, is Ohio still calling her? Is the place we’ve been staying never to be the place we stay? She looks at me level, no joking here. “Winston-Salem.”

Well, I guess we are from North Carolina. It’s nice to be home.

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From Coal River Road to White Mist Lane

is more than forty years,

several hundred miles

as the crow truly flies, one point to another,

and sometimes back,

no straighter than a crooked river

wrecked by mines.

Here the landscapers claw in stony earth

to sow some seed

while wings of straw fly it away.

My lawn’s a futile thing

where rocks and trees should be.

I stoop to gather stubborn stones,

pretend I do it for the grass,

but in their quartz and granite peaks

admittedly ground to bits by time

I find the mountain of my blood

and hear the ancient syllables spilled,

silenced now by cul-de-sac

and swaying Mylar storks,

a neighborhood of strangers

increasing overnight.

from Coal River Road, Livingston Press, The university of West Alabama; © 2013

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Linda spots the book on top of my pile, next in queue for reading, and its title speaks right up and makes its demands known. “We need to save this one for Jodi.” Who was born in Ohio but lives in coal country, and whose career has been to tell its stories as naturalist and interpreter in the New River Gorge near Beckley, WV. Indeed, I’ll share it with Jodi, this book I bought from a friend whose poetry I’ve admired for many years, whom I’ve come to know better through the North Carolina Poetry Society Board, and whose more recent book I featured here three years ago. Now I open the book, though, and out spill the connections and intersections. Kathy, just up the road there at Isothermal Community College, I never realized we’ve come from the same place!

Kathy Ackerman grew up in Ohio (like me, at least from 8th grade on) far from her birthplace and her family’s heritage. In later years she has mainly visited the old home state for funerals, but the landscapes, place names, family memories, and fortunes (or lack thereof) of West Virginia are the palette from which she paints these poems of Coal River Road. This collection is yearning for home, but home is something slippery and out of reach. A bright fleck in a stone might remind her of the mountain in her blood, but returning to stand on the that mountain she discovers a hint of strangeness and regret. Perhaps the yearning itself is home, the uprooted and cast adrift feeling that keeps a person looking for something solid, for something that means.

I identify with these poems. Kathy uses imagery and memory not just to disclose the past but to define the present. She can only be the person she is because she’s traveled the twisting roadways through old hollers and coves as well as the West Virginia Turnpike straight up to Ohio’s new sown lawns. And finally I-77 South. Although Kathy Ackerman didn’t settle in this state until a full ten years after I did, I can assure you that she is from North Carolina.

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Coal River Road by Kathy Ackerman is available from Livingston Press. Her more recent book is Repeat After Me from Redhawk Publications (2022).

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Because we never had the conversation

I am following a hearse that winds

down Coal River Road toward Whitesville.

How to say irrational to bury you here

in the only land we own outright,

owned for generations

though none of us can visit your grave

in less than a day.

These plots foreshadow the ending

no matter the story you wanted to tel.

you never wanted to return, like this or not.

You’d cringe to see this dingy place,

smelling of rot as if what remains

of the Big Coal River

seeps in each night while the corpses await

their faraway bereaved.

For once, I’m relieved to by unromantic.

That body is merely a souvenir

a keepsake – you wore it every day.

Symbol. Skin. Form.

I am relieved to know you’re not really here

though there’s nowhere else for us to go

to pay our respects. It is not respect

that brought you here, but silence,

the failure to make a better plan

because you never learned to say goodbye.

from Coal River Road, Livingston Press, The university of West Alabama; © 2013

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