In busy hands lie the greatest stillness, in
mountains quilted with rain, where crickets cry
midnight and noon, I walk, you walk on bane-
laden slopes bathed in green, stroked long ago by
the steps of the circuit court rider.
We step over his satchel, where tobacco and
script, paled to the vein of a flower,
lie curled among the vines
that crush them. (Beside them toadstools push
up their shadows.)
We step over his saddle, whose cinch broke the
night when attacked by the headless horseman, he
spurred his fine gray stallion to a stumble.
And perhaps no night goes by but he doesn't rise
from the bones that float their silver from one
mountainside to another.
The dead laugh knowingly, but can they peel this
fruit? How the worm removes even the wildest
rose to another country.
In West Virginia, no one walks on water. A wind
rises as we start to cross the border, and on a road
that plunges straight down to the flatlands,
narrowing as it goes (like a fountain), farmers
wade to church on Sunday morning.
THE HOLLOW
from Short and Simple Annals: Poems about Appalachia (1983)
Reading Li'l Abner in the Sunday paper, she thinks
of her grandmother and how she wore her hair:
All coiled, white and gleaming, tucked at the back
of her head.
She thinks of Al Capp's wit. He spreads it across
the page in screaming reds and yellows, but it ends
up silent: all coiled, white and gleaming, tucked
at the back of her head.
Reading Li'l Abner in the Sunday paper, she thinks
of her sister, who's dumb but sweet; whose vital
statistics like Daisy Mae's are 36-24-36; whose
husband is some General Motors VIP.
All coiled, white and gleaming, tucked at the back
of her head are yesterday's dreams, today's poverty,
tomorrow's chores. She bites her fingernails down to
the quick, and then some more.
Reading Li'l Abner in the Sunday papers, she thinks
of her husband: his shoulders are narrow. He's smart.
He's an Irish Catholic who shadowboxes with the wall
and reeks of Scotch.
All coiled, white and gleaming, tucked at the back
of her head is a vision of her father dead in a
cemetery in West Virginia, is a vision of her mother
still in bed, sleeping late on Sunday morning.
Reading Li'l Abner in the Sunday papers, she thinks
of her childhood, lost forever in a hollow overhung
by towering Appalachian beeches. Her tears lie all coiled
white and gleaming, tucked at the back of her head.
MOTHER MILKING
from Short and Simple Annals (1983)
FOR CHRISTINE MCKINNIE
Turn down the brim of your old felt hat
so all I can see are your rosy lips
Chew on them absently
Think thoughts I have no way of hearing
Step carefully through
the muck of the barn
Stop to look at the beginning of sun:
beside each brown slat a blue one
Sigh and rub the ache in the bone
the place over the heart where fullness
has flown like a hen out of a coop go
around the black snake that lies in your path
The eggs inside its belly strung out
like cocoons just before the butterflies
emerge from their safekeeping Shush the hens
that roost in a row on the cow's back
Listen to the soft cooing issuing
from their throats to the ruffling
of their shiny feathers as they rise
to the rafters like powder puffs
Here where nothing moves but the cow chewing
its cud its dull stare turning to rock
Make your hands flash in the dark
make them light up the barn
as they take me back to that moment
in my childhood where nothing belongs but milk
filling the pail inch by inch
with its white froth
warm and sweet
as the breath of a baby
MUSIC
from Short and Simple Annals (1983)
The house where I was born had a big front yard.
The porch was blue eye shadow.
The dwarf cedar had eczema. Rain rolled
down it like water off a duck's back.
The moon-faced walk led to a gate
that creaked when the wind opened it.
This music rivaled the bee's tiny bell,
the bird's bubbling promise. Most of the time
I heard it: the iron gate's solo, its dog face
looking both ways, its ears curled up like snails.
Sometimes I made this music myself:
swinging back and forth, listening to
the click and moan that sounded
like my heart in the dead of night
when in the bedroom alone I heard
through the wall the ghost of a quarrel:
mother's dark hair, pressed against the chair's
pale flank, my father's fist raised and juggling
the anger that when it fell smashed
my mother's face in two like precious china.
IRENE MCKINNEY
(April 20, 1939–)
“I'm a hillbilly, a woman, and a poet,” says Irene McKinney, “and I understood early on that nobody was going to listen to anything I had to say anyway, so I might as well just say what I want to.” She has said what she wanted in four collections of poetry. In 1985, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She has also been awarded a West Virginia Commission on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. In 1994, she was named Poet Laureate of West Virginia.
Born in Belington, West Virginia, where she currently lives, McKinney is the daughter of Celia and Ralph Durrett. She earned her B.A. from West Virginia Wesleyan College, her M.A. from West Virginia University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Utah. She has taught poetry at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Utah, the University of New Mexico, Western Washington University, and Hamilton College. Currently, she teaches English and creative writing at her alma mater, West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon.
About McKinney's book of poems Six O'Clock Mine Report, poet Maxine Kumin has written, “I am grateful for the poems that burst forth from her West Virginia roots to shape this fine collection.”
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Poetry: Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989), Quick Fire and Slow Fire (1988), The Wasps at the Blue Hexagons (1984), The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap (1976). Edited book: Backcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia (2002).
SECONDARY
Maggie Anderson, “The Mountains Dark and Close around Me,” in Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 39. Jeff Mann, “A Conversation with Irene McKinney,” in Her Words (2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 194–205.
TWILIGHT IN WEST VIRGINIA: SIX O'CLOCK MINE REPORT
from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989)
Bergoo Mine No. 3 will work: Bergoo Mine
No. 3 will work tomorrow. Consol. No. 2
will not work: Consol. No. 2 will not
work tomorrow.
Green soaks into the dark trees.
The hills go clumped and heavy
over the foxfire veins
at Clinchfield, One-Go, Greenbrier.
At Hardtack and Amity the grit
abrades the skin. The air is thick
>
above the black leaves, the open mouth
of the shaft. A man with a burning
carbide lamp on his forehead
swings a pick in a narrow corridor
beneath the earth. His eyes flare
white like a horse's, his teeth glint.
From his sleeves of coal, fingers
with black half-moons: he leans
into the tipple, over the coke oven
staining the air red, over the glow
from the rows of fiery eyes at Swago.
Above Slipjohn a six-ton lumbers down
the grade, its windows curtained with soot.
No one is driving.
The roads get lost in the clotted hills,
in the Blue Spruce maze, the red cough,
the Allegheny marl, the sulphur ooze.
The hill-cuts drain; the roads get lost
and drop at the edge of the strip job.
The fires in the mines do not stop burning.
DEEP MINING
from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989)
Think of this: that under the earth
there are black rooms your very body
can move through. Just as you always
dreamed, you enter the open mouth
and slide between the glistening walls,
the arteries of coal in the larger body.
I knock it loose with the heavy hammer.
I load it up and send it out
while you walk up there on the crust,
in the daylight, and listen to the coal-cars
bearing down with their burden.
You're going to burn this fuel
and when you come in from your chores,
rub your hands in the soft red glow
and stand in your steaming clothes
with your back to it, while it soaks
into frozen buttocks and thighs.
You're going to do that for me
while I slog in the icy water
behind the straining cars.
Until the swing-shift comes around.
Now, I am the one in front of the fire.
Someone has stoked the cooking stove
and set brown loaves on the warming pan.
Someone has laid out my softer clothes,
and turned back the quilt.
Listen: there is a vein that runs
through the earth from top to bottom
and both of us are in it.
One of us is always burning.
SUNDAY MORNING, 1950
from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989)
Bleach in the foot-bathtub.
The curling iron, the crimped, singed hair.
The small red marks my mother makes
across her lips.
Dust in the road, and on the sumac.
The tight, white sandals on my feet.
In the clean sun before the doors,
the flounces and flowered prints,
the naked hands. We bring
what we can—some coins,
our faces.
The narrow benches we don't fit.
The wasps at the blue hexagons.
And now the rounding of the unbearable
vowels of the organ, the O
of release. We bring
some strain, and lay it down
among the vowels and the gladioli.
The paper fans. The preacher paces,
our eyes are drawn to the window,
the elms with their easy hands.
Outside, the shaven hilly graves we own.
Durrett, Durrett, Durrett. The babies there
that are not me. Beside me,
Mrs. G. sings like a chicken
flung in a pan on Sunday morning.
…This hymnal I hold in my hands.
This high bare room, this strict accounting.
This rising up.
THE ONLY PORTRAIT OF EMILY DICKINSON
from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989)
The straight neck held up out of the lace
is bound with a black velvet band.
She holds her mouth the way she chooses,
the full underlip constrained by a small muscle.
She doesn't blink or look aside,
although her left eye is considering
a slant. She would smile
if she had time, but right now
there is composure to be invented.
She stares at the photographer.
The black crepe settles. Emerging
from the sleeve, a shapely hand
holds out a white, translucent blossom.
“They always say things which embarrass
my dog,” she tells the photographer.
She is amused, but not as much as he'd like.
VISITING MY GRAVESITE TALBOTT CHURCHYARD, WEST VIRGINIA
from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989)
Maybe because I was married and felt secure and dead
at once, I listened to my father's urgings about “the future”
and bought this double plot on the hillside with a view
of the bare white church, the old elms, and the creek below.
I plan now to use both plots, luxuriantly spreading out
in the middle of a big double bed.—But no,
finally, my burial has nothing to do with my marriage, this lying
here
in these same bones will be as real as anything I can imagine
for who I'll be then, as real as anything undergone, going back
and forth to “the world” out there, and here to this one spot
on earth I really know. Once I came in fast and low
in a little plane and when I looked down at the church,
the trees I've felt with my hands, the neighbors’ houses
and the family farm, and I saw how tiny what I loved or knew
was,
it was like my children going on with their plans and griefs
at a distance and nothing I could do about it. But I wanted
to reach down and pat it, while letting it know
I wouldn't interfere for the world, the world being
everything this isn't, this unknown buried in the known.
LOUISE MCNEILL
(January 9, 1911–June 16, 1993)
Poet Louise McNeill was born in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, on a farm that was settled by her ancestors in 1769. She earned an A.B. degree from Concord College in Athens, West Virginia, and, at the age of nineteen, began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. She later earned a master's degree from Miami of Ohio, and a Ph.D. in history from West Virginia University.
In 1938, McNeill won the Atlantic Monthly Poetry Award and was invited to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference where she studied with Robert Frost. In the fall of 1938, McNeill was awarded a fellowship to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Her first major collection of poems, Gauley Mountain, was published in 1939, after Archibald MacLeish took an interest in her work. In that same year, she married “Yankee schoolteacher” Roger Pease. The couple lived outside the region for many years, but returned to West Virginia in 1959.
For the next twenty years, McNeill taught history and English at various West Virginia colleges and universities. She was named Poet Laureate of West Virginia in 1979 by West Virginia governor Jay Rockefeller.
In McNeill's autobiography, The Milkweed Ladies, she reminisces about the West Virginia farm that had been in her family since the eighteenth century.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Poetry: Hill Daughter: New & Selected Poems (1991), Elderberry Flood: The History, Lore, and Land of West Virginia Written in Verse Form (1979), Paradox Hill: From Appalachia to Lunar Shore (1972), Time Is Our House (1942), Gauley Mountain (1939), Mountain White (1931). Memoir: The Milkweed Ladies (1988).
SECONDARY
Maggie Anderson, Introduction, Hill Daughter: New & Selected Poems
(1991), xiii–xxvi. Arthur C. Buck, “Louise McNeill, West Virginia's Hill Daughter,” From a Dark Mountain (1972), 24–26. Loyal Jones, review of The Milkweed Ladies, Appalachian Heritage 17:2 (spring 1989), 63–64. “Louise McNeill,” Appalachian Heritage 13:4 (fall 1985), 12. “Louise M. Pease, 82, Poet of Appalachia,” New York Times, 19 June 1993, 10.
THE OTHER WOMAN
from Appalachian Heritage (1985)
This windy morning as I stuffed
The rags around my window sill,
I found the strips that she had tucked
Against a wind that now is still.
Her rags were brown, and mine are gray
Hers stained and rotted; mine are new;
And yet, as women learn to stuff
(As once, at least, all women do)
Rags against terror—so she bent—
Then I, and now our rags are blent
Gray in the brown; from hill to hill
My wind goes screaming—hers is still.
AUBADE TO FEAR
(HEAVY WITH CHILD)
from Hill Daughter (1991)
Last night as I lay cold with fear
Of my travail now drawing near,
A gray wind I no longer hear
Blew from the darkness over me—
Blew southward from the Norn-white skies
Until I slept with seeing eyes—
Seeing no bauble fit to prize.
Not seeing dawn, its thin gray trace
Turn gold upon the pillow lace
And touch the warm beloved face.
Not seeing all I lived to own:
The torque of rubies, stone by stone,
The living pages touched and known.
Seeing instead that nets are small
Which shield us from the sparrow's fall,
How frail the rooftree and the wall,
How thin the string by which we tie
Our great ships of the wind and sky—
And what a little thing to die.
HILL DAUGHTER
from Hill Daughter (1991)
Land of my fathers and blood, oh my fathers, whatever
Is left of your grudge in the rock, of your hate in the stone;
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