Knox Thompson first crossed paths with the man who would…
Dungannon in Relief
So all I have are snatches
of a dream I can’t remember:
roads drawn as if by fingers
in the dust, hills with sun-stiff peaks.
Escape and tell the story
that you know, some ancestor
must have said, but no one did.
I’m still not sure if anyone
remembers it; that is to say:
I don’t exactly know
if my mother’s siblings sneaked
beneath the honeysuckle bushes
by the rails to feel the hum
of coal trucks in their ribs.
Whoever planted us
went underground, curetted light
from out the mountainside,
and had none left
to write their history by.
Still Mamaw traced the tracks
to work after my mother—
seventh child of I-
don’t-know-how-many
came-and-went before—
was born into a Sunday,
Father’s Day, and couldn’t
hear him say, “Just look
at that baby smiling at me.”
That’s how the story goes,
what little of it I know.
Come winter, shocks
of snow like blown glass
banked the gullies. Help rose
like a poltergeist. All the world
went fickle, pony tired.
That is to say what’s left,
what comes to mind, is this:
the bloodshot whites
of light-eyed men in dark
relief, their industry smeared
on their cheeks; the dreamy
sighs of dreamy girls
unsure why they can’t chart
the map of stars they feel
they’re made from.
When the boulder fell
(or the mine caved in,
or when William Howard
covered for a friend),
the money wasn’t there
to say it in the papers.
Or, that is to say, Virginia
is for lovers, which we
were, but talk’s not cheap.
Who wouldn’t want
to find our stone-cut eyes
trawling the church aisle,
or sink into the cream-cool creek
and pull the leeches
off each other’s supple feet?
However it goes, we’re tilled earth
retching poppies; or, we’re transplants,
perennials adapted to the heat.
We must believe in something—
call it tragic inevitability,
or early-onset discontent.
Maybe we’ve lost to history,
(maybe it’s just me),
but still something goes on,
spangling the quiet dark.