This is that time of year where the nights become longer and early afternoon sun seems to linger in the sky longer than ever; where leaves coat the pavement in red-and-orange fractal patterns. It's a great time of year for poetry, especially poems by North Carolina native Ron Rash, who focuses on quiet moments, the short distance between life and death, the impact that landscapes have on the human heart.
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| Ron Rash |
Here's the opening to one of the best poems in the book, "Under Jocassee":
One summer morning when
the sky is blue and deep
as the middle of the lake,
rent a boat and shadow
Jocassee's western shoreline
until you reach the cove that
once was the Horsepasture River.
Now bow your head and soon
you'll see as through a mirror
not a river but a road
flowing underneath you.
It's an eerie image--a road far beneath the water, hinting at a submerged past. This is one the most important aspects of Rash's writing--the past is still there, lurking slightly under the surface, not at all hard to find.
In other poem, "Black-Eyed Susan", we meet an elderly farmer who lives next to a cemetery, and one day finds a Black-Eyed Susan with an attached note that has blown onto his property:
Always was all that is said,
which said enough for I knew
what grave that note belonged to,
and knew as well who wrote it,
he and her married three months
when he died, now always young,
always their love in the first bloom,
too new to life to know life
was no honeymoon. Instead,
she learned that lesson with me
His wife has left the note on her former lover's grave, and he's constantly that a part of her heart still yearns for another. After his wife passes away, the farmer makes a visit to the graveyard:
I'll cross the pasture, make sure
her stone's not starting to lean,
if it's early summer bring
black-eyed susans for her grave,
leave a few on his as well,
for soon enough we'll all be
sleeping together
Those last lines are funny and bleak in equal measure. Rash loves to tell us a sentimental story that ends on a bittersweet note. In "In the Barn", the narrator and his cousin sneak into a barn to escape a storm:
We settled as well, let straw
pillow our heads as rain tucked
its loud hush tighter around us.
My cousin lay on his back,
eyes closed, hands on chest as though
already getting ready
for a wake eight years away,
Perhaps the strongest section of the book is "Eureka Mill", which focuses on the lives of workers in a Carolina mill town, farmers who fled their dying land to make a living in unforgiving factories. In "Mill Village", one worker buys a painting to hang on his ramshackle wall:
Sometimes at night if I was feeling low,
I'd stuff my ears with cotton. Then I'd stare
up at that picture like it was a window,
and I was back home listening to the farm.
Another, "Accident", sadly needs no introduction:
But her baby had been sick, kept her awake
three nights in a row. She was so tired
she barely kept her head up. When she didn't
those flyers grabbed her hair, would not let go
until her scalp came too. I guess she screamed
though who could hear her over the machines.
These mill workers wreck their bodies, their relationships, and their spirit for measly paydays. In "Black and White", we see Colonel Springs and his family posing for a Christmas photo, dressed up as workers as a gag:
The Colonel placed himself behind a cart
filled up with bobbins, arms taut, brow creased.
His wife stood behind him, her hair tied back
to authenticate the blank look on her face.
The children too pretended they were working,
leaned their lean bodies against a machine.
However, even the slimy mill owner is given a shade of humanity by Rash, in "Plane Crash", although even the Colonel's grief is a posture:
The next day he was back at work
and never showed his son has died,
so we said nothing, let him pass,
glad he understood the need
for him to act like even death
could never make him one of us.
In 166 pages of poems we get what feels like a complete overview of Carolina mountain country; the occasional joy and frequent despair of its residents, the unforgiving landscape that isolates them from the rest of the world. Rash ends his collection with a few new poems, my favorite of which is "Direction", about a late night traveler on an unfamiliar road:
but what opens the heart's need
wide as this night are the rooms
lit as if someone waits up
to give directions should you
lose your way on this bypass
back to your knowable life.
