Oops

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

The mountains saw God. And oops.
Their hair turned white. Parted nice and neat
in between full wavering ridgelines combed over into neat clean
albeit dusty looking landscaping. Streaks of dark where evergreen
keeps the whole scene dirtier and salt and peppered. Bovines speckled
like dandruff and the hillside is framed in farmhouses for ears.

Muddy overflowing creeks at the bottoms of powder white mountains.

Electrified, traumatized by the divine presence
streaked white lightning like a skunk’s sour complexion.
Smell it from a corpse on the side of the twisted mountain spine.
Conscious thoughts in cars slow one by one slink up along connecting
traffic circles and overlapping highway junctions to thoroughfares down around
the hips to the mind. Some house in a row of them. This one is mine. My mind.

When it believes it perceives a thing it fails to describe.
A jolt of spirit blown white lights the burning penetrating radioactive kind.
Snow. High of sixty yesterday. Tonight. Oops. Low of nineteen. God.

Is not all these mountains have seen.

School

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

What is a flood to a fish. Fast running earth softening apocalypse.
White water parted around park benches. Is there a little low cabin
of stiller cold current stable along the stirred up muck lined basin.
Does the flood happen far above the heads of fish. Wait it out
weighted out way deep down. Beneath high water. New real estate.
New adventure. Was the fish’s world expanded by a natural disaster.
Thick rich one percent water heavy with death and nutrients.

Button eyes glued on and bulged out, flake of shiny black sequin set in a droplet of water
and loose to roll around while each slippery scaly arrowheaded wing throated muscle
patiently packed with tin cans rolling across the bottom of so many drowned rivers.
Horny heads hidden in creeks. Bass buried bellies brushing the bottom
of every many layered lake. Is that it, to fish, a flood. More traffic delay than catastrophe.
Bringing off the beaten path shortcuts into possibility. Honey get off at the bridge.
What bridge? I never saw a bridge here before. How could that be.
Well it never was underwater before.

I see. Said a blind fish. Lost in filth laden busybody highly agitated medium. Fast falling.
Dirty. Rich. Maybe floods are the opposite. For fish. When the weather is rough.
People hide inside and wonder how high the creek might rise,
how much more the lake can swallow before it is finally full.
But for fish, maybe a flood, means time to go to school.

Below the Road

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

The river always wanted to climb a mountain. Watch it. Rising higher. Growing whiter. Wilder. Spitting out tree trunks roots still attached. Streams and creeks and snaking roadway gutters running fast as they can to get down off the mountain. Sweating. Soiled. Stumbling several steps, unstoppable. Making a run on the banks. The river wants to take its money and run. It wants to climb a mountain. So it eats them. Inch by mile etched furrows that segment land masses and imperfectly complete them. One side to the other. Between ridges. The irony to write here how rivers are like bridges. How often roads run along them. Set their course on them. Bows up all proud in the summer brown shoulders and swallowing boulders reaches out a hand, and rivers and roads will dance. All twisted tightly together in and throughout the sharp, river etched mountains of southwest Virginia. But when the music has ended, there are places the road must go where the river can not follow. And there are places where the road can not stand it any longer, and takes off headlong down the mountain after it. The two are tied together, linked, but it would be a mistake to take it as indication of similarity. The river always wanted to be a mountain. It is always eating rocks and mud and trees and things.
But every road is already a river.
Anyone who has ever built a road or trail knows, or even just looked close.

It’s like my grandfather would say.
Don’t build a house below the road.

My Window

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Lake all pukey green.

Once white teeth stained yellow by its acidic churning.

Sour-looking. Running the wrong way. This lake.

Is a mask set on top of a river. By the TVA.

This lake cost a lot of people their homes.

Dented ridges climb the other side then taper down into Damascus.

America is a crapshoot for naming things.

White can be seen through trees against mountain scalp like dandruff.

Undisturbed beneath thinning hair. Itchy-looking.

Dry cold makes a wet nose and specks of dust out of falling snow.

Virginia. Old girl. I have decided not to say it.

Wind. Sucking at the windowsill. Battling doors.

Carrying the recyclables all across the yard.

Bombastic voices on the television warn us ‘stay indoors’.

Polar Vortex. Man wears a rolex. Catches light

point out Saltville. Bristol. Then Wytheville.

Only flurries, near Hillsville. Blue eyes pierce.

Stared into camera two.

May as well give his ‘back to you’.

She. Muted. Tells about lost and found children.

Geese bowl over one another down by green water.

White birds stalk yellow waves. Winter wind.

Pushes the river the wrong way. Backward.

Black birds beat wings against the weather.

Took them ten minutes to clear my window.

Not in that order.

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Groseclose. Atkins. Not in that order.
Knot Maul Branch Shelter.
Because settlers could not afford the iron.

Grouse cut loose just up a head, at the nose of the dog, scouting ahead.
The sound their wings made punishing air and us for coming too close.
Early morning. Before nine. More importantly. Before coffee.
Eight birds was just enough to fooly wake us up.
And scare the dog. Most famous of us all.

Mount Rogers. Does he happen to be related to mister?
All I want to know is who to blame for all these blisters.

Wilson Creek. South Holston.
Seven Holsteins dead stare eyes static mouths chewing leftover breakfast.
Dear mom,
I’m writing to say I’m hiking the entire Appalachian Pasture.
It’s swell. Throwing legs over ladders in bolted crosses across barbed wire.
Like a rustler. Like a thief. Mom, I may never leave.

My backpack is become a part of me.
Full. In the most intentional manner imaginable.
Stuffed. With stuff for each and every day,
of the three to come. And six in the past.

If you wanted to come.
You only had to ask.

Bastian. And then. There is Bland. Not in that order.
But just after Abingdon. Then back here again.

To track Appalachians. North.
Until the mountains end.

This country

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

I love this country.
Seated against a tree in Virginian highlands.
I love this country. And, I know what all that means.
Mountain pillars float above foundation streams.
Tall rooted sunlight schemes wiggling green.
Evening breeze.

I love when high wind sweeps low and stillness quivers.

Feel this shiver as it slinks along my spine.
Ends up near my mind.
I love a cup of wine.
I love to breathe smoke.
To nurse fire.
I love the country where I am.
Gnats wings electricity near my ear.
Fire molesting moist wood.
Hesitant to burn.
Begged to be left alone.
This country is my home.
And I am anything but inclined to protect it.

On my feet.
Eating miles.
Wide hip pictures of horizons
and boot prints on the trail.

I love this country best.
I love it with footsteps.
With my time.

Houses. Jobs. Farms. Goats. Careers. Left behind.
By definition. They are not this country.
Which was here long before we were.
And will remain so long past I. Us. We.

Lovers of continents we can’t understand.

There are better ways than words to say it.

Try walking.