The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Scott Owens THE LAND ABOVE THIS LINE IS OAK from Thomas Anderson’s 1817 Map of South Carolina’s Edgefield District The difference between granite and clay falling away to limestone, between trees that break and those that bend out of the ground roots and all, between stars blacked out for half the year and those that shine year-round faint but sure through yellow bristle of pine. The difference between sandspur and beggar lice, mistletoe and muscadine, plateau and sandhill running out to plain, between names like Frogmore and Clover, Soul's Harbor and Hard Labour Creek. Each day they meet at the line like old friends, shake hands above it, share the earth below. Growing up along this line we knew that pine meant climbing higher on limbs getting thinner with each step upward, that oak meant broad limbs branching out from the same trunk, a cradle you could hide in past nightfall. This is a very specific place in every mind it touches. It will be something you swung from, something you crossed despite the danger of buckshot, something you held tight before you, your back bending against its going away. In winter even the river stands up like a line. It may now slide off the bed it has made and not spread or fade into earth, but splinter, shard, run like a great tongue across your doorstep, dividing your house in half. "Your house is sliding down the hill and will soon be in the road," says one to the other. "Yours is caving in on itself and will be a pile of rubble by next year." They depend on this. "Died mostly of death," she says, "like any day that won't last." He spends his days counting, drawing lines on maps frayed with rain. There is hardly a boundary he hasn’t crossed, though even he can't see the lines he swears are there. The secret meaning of the line is that it's made to be climbed over, crawled under, walked around. THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF STILLNESS I turned my back to the stream, not wanting, for once, to see movement. I lay down, flush to the ground, stared in perfect stillness at a clear sky, held hands from wringing, kept fingers from turning blades of grass. I quieted thought, calmed away anxiety, remorse, let tensions slip like rain into the earth beneath me. Nothing came. Nothing rose from the pool of the past to pull me back. I waited. Nothing moved me to tears, laughter, words. Still, there were things I couldn't stop, breath, pulse, desire. SOUL SOCIETY This is my son's spot, where the river turns and heads away, a place he widened with his own hands, scooping out sand, to a beach of his own making. He likes it here, beneath the biggest tree around, out of sight of everyone else. The water is high today and orange with mud. I've disturbed a flock of starlings, gregarious in their warnings, their proclamations of squatter's rights. I shouldn't be here. I should be back with the others, mingling, playing the good host, but I've just read a poem about patterns, and now I see honeysuckle climb the spiral stair of a sweetgum tree. Everything grows here, things I cannot name, some wild lily at my foot, a five-leafed vine, something almost like dogwood, a tree with its own camouflage, green on lighter green. How long would I have to stay here to turn to something green? I used to know how to be alone, to move from solitude to belonging, but now I can't fight the urge to go back and be with those I came from. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |