Waking. Ron Rash

      Green plush of bank moss, a smell

      like after rain, and the creek

      deepening behind the shed

      where Nolan White spent his time

      to wedge hours and seconds

      out of time, free them to spill

      out the open door as if

      another current flowing

      through the pool where I sank worms

      to raise watery rainbows.

      His one son had died, so now

      he worked alone, making clocks

      for Boone tourists. Once I laid

      down my tackle, stepped inside

      a moth-swirl of ticks and chimes,

      at the center lathed chestnut

      laid upon two sawhorses,

      what Nolan White bent over,

      hands dipping in, attentive

      as a surgeon as he set

      each gear in place. When it stirred

      he brought me close, let me hear

      that one pulse among many.

The Wallet

      Knee deep in the Watauga’s

      rock leaping whitewater,

      my brother loses his balance,

      his life if our father

      doesn’t flail downstream

      swimming air, running river,

      tripping on stones to collar

      his son, drag to a sandbar,

      confirm with tentative fingers

      his empty back pocket.

      We pace back and forth on the shoreline,

      down to the bridge, the other bank

      before the sun finally falls

      blurring the river in darkness,

      my father not saying, don’t worry,

      a life is priceless, not saying

      something like that, not tousling

      my brother’s hair and smiling.

      For this is October. My father

      believes he’ll be fired soon,

      will face winter’s cold coming

      without thirty-four washed-away dollars.

Myopia

      They belonged to the mother

      of my grandmother, removed

      the morning she died, each lens

      a clear coin, arms and rims

      tarnished gold wire, folded in

      their black velvet-lined casket

      two decades, until I wiped

      dust from each lens, let my face

      look out a window to see

      the world as she did, and saw

      a gray blur become a barn,

      apples emerge from green sleeves

      of branches, and told no one.

Charley Starnes

      After the woods a sudden

      swoon of light in a clearing

      and I am where I was then,

      that summer morning I brought

      food to Charley Starnes who drank

      rotgut whiskey so he might

      douse the memory of gas

      searing his lungs, the bullet

      that almost opened his heart.

      Say sir, my grandmother said,

      gave me the tin of biscuits,

      mason jar of soup before

      I walked the fence line and through

      the woodshed’s board-gaps watched him

      sway back and forth before flames

      that seemed fueled by his curses,

      and what burned inside the drum

      I never knew, but left all

      I’d brought on the porch, then fled

      the place where six months later

      sleeve or shirttail dipped too close

      and Charley Starnes wore a suit

      of flames through barbed wire, into

      a corn field where they found him

      face down like a felled scarecrow,

      shattered stalks marking his swerve

      and lunge through rows as though

      a man trying to dodge fire.

Watauga County: 1959

      On Clay Ridge a crescent moon

      balanced itself, soon became

      an open parenthesis

      no father, uncle could close

      as we hunched on farmhouse steps,

      wore Sunday clothes days early,

      what conversation the rasp

      of matches. Small blades of flame

      rose to faces no tears marked

      as I heard silence widen

      like fish swirls on a calm pond,