Issue 4:1 I Poetry I Alan Brasher

Four Poems by Alan Brasher

Still We Hear Them

I follow my father into darkness,

past the small plot where his parents

and grandparents lie fenced

away from cows and goats;

along a ridge we come to my uncle—

hands cupped forward over his ears—

listening to darkness and woods.

He tells us where the dogs are—

the Poe place—three miles by road, four

hollers on foot.  As they cross the creek,

coming back into hearing, the strike

dog’s bellow sheds light on their progress;

he hollers, more than barks, at neither

the fox he chases nor the dogs that follow.

We imagine their frantic pursuit,

crashing through briars, splashing

through springs—sometimes diverted

by deer or coyote.  The dogs trace scent

trails—tracks hanging in dead air,

caressing fallen limbs and leaves; they hunt

beyond our seeing, but still we hear them.

Retreat

for Marvin Baker

When they come to see you, driving seventeen hours,

does it feel like your absent grandchildren come home,

your progeny having skipped a generation, moved directly to

these three past the children you never had? 

Having withdrawn to the cool seclusion of your northern farm,

is it still the fertile south that revivifies?  Can you drink the same

contentment from cool springs that run only in summer, paint yourself

back into the subtropical garden you worshipped in for almost a lifetime?

Last week Jim planted a butterfly garden named for you.  He tilled

the soil on Monday, and on Tuesday, seventy-odd middle schoolers,

in two equal shifts, helped with the planting.  The garden may never be

more alive than in its inception—beauty in chaos seeking order.

The next time I see you they will already have returned to report

on your condition.  They will tell me you are maintaining, that you may

even have improved, and I will have to believe them.  

Roughneck World

Driving the roller-coaster hills of county road eighty-six,

I realize that this roughneck world is the only one

I could bring children into.  Where the taste of red clay seeps in

through the smoothed-soles of cracked-vinyl brogans

that haunt the memories of every man who really savored boyhood—

who climbed it like a tree, perching high up to watch, undetected,

while time passed along the forest floor.

Woods at Night

Our wives would never join us, skirting

the edge of the woods at night, away from

the light of houses and streets. Each of us

knew that from the outset, but collective

acknowledgement held until we crossed

out of the circle of the only streetlight for

miles, the one my aunt had installed after

my grandfather died, leaving her alone

with my grandmother. I had walked over,

through the dark, following the faint glow

of a tar-and-gravel road, toward cousins

I hadn’t seen for months, hadn’t known

for years. We wanted to see the lights on

Double Oak Mountain, a good hour away

by road, visible for the first time from our

hills thanks to a miles-wide clear-cut. In

the darkness of woods, we felt again the ties

of blood, linking us to each other and to the

hills we were raised on, though I still don’t

know much about their lives.