Issue 3:1 | Poetry | R.A. Skeens

3 Poems

by R.A. Skeens

 

Dry Fork (1880)

Beavers sharpen maples

until their bases are thin as pencils.

Wind and thunder, weight of rain,

heads them into the dam. Minnows nest

in the foliage like bright birds. Skip a stone,

and beaver tails slap water like gunshots.

Upstream from the beaver lodge,

shelf rock spills white water into still.

Small mouth sun their backs at current’s edge,

wait to sucker punch dislodged hellgrammites

and crayfish, torn fingers of leaf; when your shadow

drowns itself on pebbles, those bass flex

like elbows and scoot for the undercut bank.

Dawn yesterday, Sharp’s cradled

in my arms, I sat downwind here,

held my breath, watched

a gray-muzzled elk’s rack

shred fog. One of his knees popped

as he knelt beside a stump,

lapped water with a long pied tongue,

until his twin dissolved in a slow tide

of rings. Tightening my belt,

I let him drink his fill and go.

Twelve miles south

and west, this branch meets Levisa,

washes through Vansant, Poe Town

and King. Folks squat there in their cabins,

grub a living from the rocky ground

until years husk their spirit

like an ear of corn. That river’s

civilization’s head, they can have the body

that comes with it: I’ll keep a ridge or two

between us. Head pillowed on my arms,

I listen to a woodpecker drum as he whittles

worms out of a chestnut’s hide. Midstream,

a black bear hunkers over his mitts

as if praying. A fat bass winks its belly

at the sun, and he slaps it spinning

into cattails. The soul’s here.

 

 

 

Dry Fork (1890)

Progress is white oak and black,

cherry, walnut, hickory, chestnut:

furniture factories hone them down

for bed posts, dressers, chest'er drawers,

moldings, window facings and doors;

engineers build towns, train trestles

and bridges; shipwrights---schooners.

Loggers crosscut trunks, their hands

wrapped in rags. Strippers axe them naked

of branches. Peelers bark them, way you

would skin a hog; green-slick with sap,

they spike rope to thick ends

like a halter, and jockey them off ridges

too steep for mules. In the hollow,

drillers auger holes through the log’s base,

hammer in a pig iron bar---crack

their joints shinnying them onto sled runners---

so teamsters can ring three-mule teams

to the bolts, and skid them where

Dry Fork’s branch meets Levisa.

Summer’s too dry to float them:

they stack them into pyramids

using poplar slats, wait for fall and rain,

to tumble them into the river’s bed:

flood freights them south to Pikeville,

and the trains. A board foot’s

the measure of this nation’s soul:

manipulate your environment

---by-God bleed it dry. Last week,

the work crews found an old coot

living inside a chestnut’s hollow.

When the crew raised their saws,

he gut-shot three of them

with a Sharp’s 50, would’ve

killed them all, except an axe

took his arm off at the elbow:

survivors felled that tree

while he watched, then kicked him

until he bled out.

 

 

 

Why We Write

for James Still, 1906-2001

 

Stones shape the Wolfpen,

Doglegs where water

Gnaws clay. Minnows

Crook like fingers there

Between the rocks.

 

Water seines itself

Through willow roots, the ganglia

A lion’s mane for a horny head;

Each lap’s ebb

And flow chuckles her,

Elbowing through to a nest

Under the bank’s lip.

 

A gust unhinges a poplar leaf:

Its tines scrabble like fingers

At my beard. Not finding a grip,

It slips into the stream, and current

Shoots it between stones.

 

On the south ridge,

Across the hollow,

A blackgum stump---still

For rainwater---stews its mash

Of punk and mosquito larvae. Whir.

 

A woodpecker,

Its head a slash of blood,

Lands there, works the bark

For grubs---drumming, like taps,

Echoes through the timber’s legs.

 

Earlier, I searched that blackgum

For your face, but could not find it

In the water until I closed my eyes.

Those damn stones are what

Shape our lives. Why we write.