Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Where I grew up, and still live for part of the year. It’s located near Tyrone, Pennsylvania in the valley and ridge province of the Appalachians. Plummer’s Hollow Run drains into the Little Juniata, part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
The footprint of the collapsed house
seems hardly big enough
for a closet,
let alone three floors
of moldering furniture
and typewriters full of dead beetles.
Up in the woods, a beech tree
has filled the opening beside it
with outstretched limbs.
If it calls often,
it’s a hairy woodpecker,
less often: a downy,
never: an ivory-billed.
Each year the ground grows simpler
and the sky more complex.
Right over there,
in a hollow locust tree,
a hive of wild bees used to sleep.
Clouds pull their shadows
across the snow-filled valley
as if dragging for a drowned swimmer.
I watch from the ridge,
mesmerized by the alternation
of gloom and glare.
The No Hunting sign rattles
on the electric pole
above the deep claw-marks of bears.
In a snow-bound ring of stones,
I am burning all the tissues
from my recent cold.
The sun beats down. Fallen twigs
and leaves are melting themselves
into form-fitting graves.
A flat wing of ash floats up
and hangs in the air
like a famous last word.
Trees sway like drunks
in a sudden gust of wind—
the clacking of their branches.
The whole hillside
is in motion around me,
standing here with my head cold
almost gone.
How marvelous it is
just to breathe.
Melting snow reveals old secrets.
Two spots of blood
have reemerged in the yard.
Wrinkles appear—
long, dark faultlines
from differential settling.
I know you,
I mutter to myself.
We’ve been here before.
A few degrees above freezing,
and already the first gnats
have come back to life.
Insects have mastered
the most immaculate lifelessness,
deader than any corpse:
even ice
with its many knives
never gets a chance to grow.
Having melted the snow above it,
a black stone glistens
in its pit.
All thaws seem abrupt.
Lichens slicked with meltwater
glow a lurid green.
I’m feverish—might I, too,
burn a hole
clear through to spring?
The house is pinned
under heavy snow.
My head fills with mucus.
Icy limbs strain
to reach the ground,
alternately melting and freezing.
I drip in the noon-time glare.
Let me be replenished
in nightly increments.
In all this blankness,
a squirrel finds the precise spot
it buried a nut.
Breaking trail with snowshoes,
I choose to believe
I’m half-floating, not half-sinking.
Clumps of snow sail off the trees,
making a random scatter
of oblong prints.