For the Holler, and the Life It Held

We were given the ridge, and the ridge took us back.

We were given the creek, and the company took the creek.

We were given the sourwood, the dooryard, the clapboard, the bell,

and one by one the giving was undone

so silently we did not know to grieve

until the grieving was the only thing remaining.

✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶

The seam ran deep and we believed it permanent,

the way a child believes the house he grew in

is a fact of the world, load bearing,

solid as the mountain above it.

Then the mountain was the mine

and the mine was the wound

and the wound ran orange down to where the creek had been.

✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶

There is a grief that belongs to places.

It has no rites.

No one sits with you.

No one brings food to the door of what is gone.

You drive past the caved porch, the briar-taken lane,

and the loss does not rise to meet you.

It has already settled into the ground beneath your tires.

✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶

Cincinnati received them. Columbus. Cleveland.

Cities that wanted the labor

and released it, in time, into the general forgetting.

The holler received their absence

and held it the way a hill holds water,

invisibly, deep in, for a long time.

✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶

I have stood at the rim of what was there

and called nothing,

because the voice that knew this place

lived in a body that belonged to a home

that belonged to a holler

that is no longer a place so much as a before,

something the mountain watched happen

and absorbed and will not speak of,

being a mountain,

having that kind of time.