by James Still
Fiddle
The silver light that dances on your strings
Runs like melting snow from knotted twigs,
Burning the greying hours with fire-spun wings
And stirring a pith of words into your melody.
The groined and vaulted ceiling of your song
Measures the sky with swift and anxious feet,—
O supple as white oak staves your balladry.
You are the strident lute, the harp upon the hill
Lighting veins of clay against the chimney’s breast.
You are unspoken pain, spurned words that fill
The heart to bursting in a thorny cove.
And you can dance a lively galliard at your will,
Or turn again with sudden blossoming bow
To a cardinal flaming in a redbud grove.
Mountain Men Are Free
When the buckeye flowers on the stumpy hills,
The slow plodding mare, the tall trudging plowman
Wind the ridges around with loose shallow furrows,
Dropping seedling corn in hoe-turned trenches,
While the crows flock and caucus, the partridges whistle
Under the greening fleshy stems of the burdocks’ sheltering.
The winded bony mare slings the froth from her mouthing
And sighs through wide arches of quivering nostrils.
Breaker of land, grubbing and striking among the rocks,
Splitter of rails, quilting the high meadows with fences,
Raiser of yearlings to stern bulls and soft-eyed milk cows,
Keeper of sheep that roam unshepherded in lush grazing,
Gatherer of herbs in secreted mountain hollows:
Mountain man, what do you need of life beyond your hills?
What need of strength beyond your calloused hand,
Your thick muscled shoulders, your arm’s firm steadiness?
Here you may eat untainted bread, here a free man stand.
Hill-Lonely
These were your hills, these your foggy coves
Beneath the mountain’s shadowing arms
Lifting skyward where white moonlight roves
Silent as fox feet.
These were sheltering ridges
Against long waiting, against the heart’s alarms,
Against the lengthening agony of an anxious day.
Call out of yesterday, speak to the voiceless hills
Within your heart: call to the emptiness of level earth
To lift its shoulders upward until it fills
The vast untended acres of the blossoming sky,
Until the poplars stand at angles on the mountain’s girth
And throw a mellow shade to cool a throbbing brow.
Death in the Hills
What shaggy hand can grasp the tread of years
With old skill gone and fingers dry as shucks
Beneath the oxen’s hoofs?
The droughts that seek
Green valley land, the summer gale that plucks
The ash tree’s boughs and breaks their bodies down
Have forged a web of shadows in his eyes
And pressed thick knuckles in a bone-cleft cheek.
The stallion is dead. Only the geldings
Tramp high meadows with their spindling ways
Thirsting for long-dry springs.
What creaking hand
Can dam the flood of marching swing-paced days?
This Man Dying
To this man dying speak of death.
The sounds of age lie brooding in his ears
As pigeons cooing under rotting eaves
And old hounds coughing in the dust.
His knotted breath is choked with gathered years;
His heart is creaking from an ancient rust.
Speak of death to this man dying
With the increments of time clogging his blood;
Speak of death, the rhythmic last season,
The wooden-celled, the final ripple-mark of growth
On tree, on curving horn, on earth-stained flood.
When the last pillow cups this fallen head,
Speak with the dying. Speak of the dead.
Granny Frolic
Old Granny haste your bonnet on and hie to Wolfpen Creek,
Go bit and bridle your scar-hocked nag, go rein, go ride and hurry,
Sid Gentry’s woman’s time is nigh and he’s a-plague with worry,
O he’s a-plague with all the signs the almanac can carry.
Go riding swift to Wolfpen Creek, on yon side of Dead Mare Hollow,
Go chin the ridge, go shoe the trail, go thresh the laurel thicket,
For this is Gentry’s woman’s first, the first child she’s a-bearing;
And fotch a horn of spirits along to keep Sid in the clearing.
Sid’s made a little crib of oak—
A cradle short and narrow;
He’s whittled a poke of pretties
And he’s tuck a rattler’s rattle;
He’s rid a coon of all its hide,
He’s cured it thick and furry—
But hap it be a girl-child
Young Sid will be to bury.
Old Granny gallop. Old Granny lope.
Go like a hawk-bird flying,
Go split the wind, go fork the night,
Go knife the hoot-owl’s crying,
And fotch a pot o’ barley tea,
O hurry clap the lid,
Bring all your quare needcessities,
And bring a nip to Sid;
Young Sid is thorned by all the fears,
O he is pale and lorn,
For he has hung his pride atop
A lean moon’s tipply horn.
O haste a sawyer and his tools,
A coffin-box be ready,
For hap it be a girl-child
Young Sid will be to bury.
Old Granny alight. Old Granny stay.
Come dance a mite for joy,
Sid Gentry’s firing his pistols off—
Hell’s bangers, it’s a boy.
Passing of a County Sheriff
His face is quiet as a fable, and his hands
Are wise with death. He had known this hour was here
Under a moon’s phase, at an appointed season;
He had lived by law, by instinct, and by reason.
His era of metal and brawn is over and passed.
He crippled one. He wounded seven in the line of duty,
And cut a single notch to heal a wounded pride.
He sired nine. He owned the house in which he was born,
Two fat nags and forty-six acres of crows and corn.
Here are his days summed: vote, gun, offspring and enduring wife;
Here yellows his almanac of years, his full-flagged span of life.
Drought
Troublesome Creek is a highway wandering more than natural
For a passage going somewhere and arriving at certainty;
A road aims at straight lines, though accepts a curve or two
And a rise and fall to make a scheme and nature agree;
A creek pays less mind to man than to geography.
It would take a lot of rain to span the banks of Troublesome
And fill them up and start a respectable flowing,
And waken the rushes and dampen the hair of the mosses,
Liven the springs and start the draws a-roaring;
It would take a master rain to set the creek road going.
Apples
Now that they’ve set a standard for the apple
By choosing its forebearers and placing it on a diet
And mellowing its shoulders red, yellow, or green
According to chemi-fancy and current market fiat,
And brought it to a norm in taste and dapple,
It’s hard to find a fruit that’s individual.
I praise the factory tree, the thirty-peck supremacy
Ove
r the ten-peck tree; I hail the standardization
Of fruit as round as doorknobs, as waxy as wax
(The eating’s the thing, not the explanation);
I acknowledge debt to the society of apples and facts,
To men and grafts that made the tree a hummer,
To pomological genius for developing a steady comer.
My old-time trees are doubtful from season to season,
Though usually they bear in vagrant wild-sweet unreason,
But my apples are the ones to eat for a taste of summer.
The Broken Ibis
If the legs of the bird be broken,
The arrow-legged ibis earth-pent
And on wearying wings having spent
Her final flight, sinking at last
To the dark lake, to death bespoken,
How may I who am seeker and rover
Design from wisdom of eagle and dove
A philosophy wherein the lover
Must slay his love?
Early Whippoorwill
I have a letter from Oklahoma—
A professor of logic, part-time ornithologist,
Doubts that Kentucky has had the chance to hear
A whippoorwill’s song the third month of the year
When the Sooner State must wait till April at least.
I’d heard a whippoorwill’s stout-hearted call
And printed the fact and thought it within reason
For bird or man to sing in or out of season
As any might err, might sound a note quite new,
Deny the systems and set the graphs askew.
I hold this state is not alone in being lucky
It has a whippoorwill uncommonly plucky;
I believe I’m not indulging in idle misnomer
By calling all fortunate, including Oklahoma,
When bird or thought makes lists and manuals vain.
O earliest whippoorwill, come again!
Abandoned House
There is no one in this house.
The sound you hear is wind grieving the floor,
Or a cricket’s rasp under the dusty hearth,
Or the mantel sagging with emptiness.
No living hand lifts to this door.
This house was cherished. It knew joy
Rising in happy throats, and it knew peace;
It had its share of pain, of tears,
Of the balm of time, of love full and deep.
This house is filled with yesteryears and sleep.
Wolfpen Creek
How it was in that place, how light hung in a bright pool
Of air like water, in an eddy of cloud and sky,
I will long remember. I will long recall
The maples blossoming wings, the oaks proud with rule,
The spiders deep in silk, the squirrels fat on mast,
The fields and draws and coves where quail and peewees call.
Earth loved more than any earth, stand firm, hold fast;
Trees burdened with leaf and bird, root deep, grow tall.
Apple Trip
I went to buy apples at Hurricane Gap,
I went for apples to sell and to barter,
And O the high hills friendly to orchards,
And O the fair trees sagging with riches,
With Stayman and Winesap, Red Spy and Grimes Golden;
I looked and I wondered and I stood beholden.
That trip I hauled home two hundred bushels
Of melt-in-your-mouth, of swallow-your-tongue—
Two hundred bushels of tooth-ticklers and grin-busters,
Two hundred measures of World Wonders and Sweet Rusters,
And O the trip was a sight to the world,
The journey a worldly wonder.
Funnel Spider
Here hangs a trap spun by genius.
Woven of silk it is, of intent and cunning,
And shaped funnel-like by spider mathematics.
Awesome it that would set off on such a spinning
To wind a maze so infinite and erratic,
Most skills bested, by bold phenomena contrived,
Though the greater marvel is, the spider arrived.
This is no silken cone of shrewd display;
These are the threads of wonder spun to slay.
The Trees in the Road
The cliff gave way and the slope shifted ground,
The oaks rode upright and possessed the road
And what had been hanging changed its abode,
And to get beyond was to go around.
I wrought a path through the resettled wood,
Through boneset and rue and fever-cure bed,
Through self-heal and balm once over my head.
The conquering landslide was down for good.
The bloodroot bloomed early and broke the snow,
And I plucked the stems without climbing high,
And I dug the roots without mounting sky.
The wild from above was as wild below.
Lamp
From Wolfpen’s head to Breeding’s rocky steep
Only my lamp is burning now so late;
Clouds have eaten the stars, the moon lurks low,
My world is great with darkness death will know.
My lone light slaves to make an honest dint
In night at heel, on shadows thick as hate;
One breath to flame and blackness is unfurled,
One quenching wind and it will blind my world.
Man O’ War
Upon proud feet
That trod eternal grass
His race was run.
Fleet as hungry blood,
On paths laid narrowly,
His prowess won.
Perpetuity in beauty,
In life carved splendidly
With wondrous hoofs,
He was the swift,
The warm brown marble
Of the sun.
Lizard
A critter breakfasts on slain flies
Upon my doorsill, and when he is full
Chins himself on dwarf legs
And stares with cold saurian eyes
To fit me into his world.
I try to sound the lizard mind,
To stand one inch in flesh and thought;
I note his body is leather wrought,
I judge he is built tough to stay.
Could we swap skins I might be adamant,
But he would not endure the day.
On Being Drafted into the
U.S. Army from My Log Home
in March 1942
Weather and time, time and weather
Shriveled the wall, crumbled and chinking,
Raised the top log, the lower sinking,
Opening a space between upper and nether,
Making a crack for inside to look out
And outside to peer wonderingly in;
Peer wonderingly in where I am sleeping,
Trouble the dark, harry and flout
Slumberer from sleep, cricket from neeping.
But who on an evening at a quarter past seven
Stared from dusk and weight of heaven?
Mars hung bright in the Wolfpen sky
And glared and met me eye to eye.
Mars looked in and routed me out.
Candidate
It all depends on how many faces you can wear.
You can travel a distance on three or four;
On a dozen you can go almost anywhere.
They tell me you are a good man for county judge,
A good man despite a conscience as flexible as leather,
Despite the easy promises you genially swear,
Despite the quake of laughter to soothe a voter’s grudge.
I am told one should choose political brothers,
And a man must raise his hand for somebody.
If I should raise my hand, and I lift it for you,
For which face shall I vote?—Yours is
shifty as weather.
I think I would choose the one Adam wore
If I could find it under all the others.
A man must raise his hand for somebody.
Winter Tree
A lot goes on behind my back.
A row of icicles pulling at the eaves
Grew three inches before I thought to look;
A snow falling an evening through
Contrived knee-depth before I knew.
I see what’s done. The doing is concealed.
Things happen I know nothing of,
But once I saw a walnut shed her leaves
All in haste, within a half hour’s time,
And shift her season, become a winter tree,
Stand bare of foliage and her body free,
The last bough stark, the farthest twig revealed.
A lot goes on while my head is turned,
And nobody bothers to watch and hallo “Look!”
“Welcome, Somewhat, Despite the Disorder”
Come inside
Where I am—
I alone.
Nobody else
Is here,
Or ever
Has been.
Come in
Nevertheless;
Overlook this,
Blind eye to that.
Two rooms
Have I:
The Heaven Room,
The Hell Room.
I dwell in both.
Come inside
And discover
You live
Likewise.
Of the Wild Man
It will take a little while to find him.
He may be in some unlikely place
Lying beneath a haw, lost in leafy sleep,
Or atop a high field digging his keep.
He is somewhere around. Go and look.
It will take a little while to find him,