Every poem in Dark Hills of Home had its birth among the foothills and hollows of the western Alleghenies, between the Ohio and Monongahela rivers in the heart of Appalachia--- where the sun rises late and sets early, and the night is never entirely absent.
Between Low Gap and Ramon
Over a road
shoaled with fog and last light,
she
rode quietly
in
the first of the plastic seats,
a
mask of cigarette smoke among the others,
the
gray-silvered bus bending its way
around
the many turnings that swerve
between
Low Gap and Ramon,
the
roadside locusts a shivered blue of shadow
wreathed
in grape rope and poison.
“Somewhere here,”
she said, “somewhere
between
the culvert bridge and
the
Cox for Sheriff tree . . . he said
a
red box, must be a mailbox would be it,
be
a lane, and he would get me there.”
But in that
settling mist
swept
with light we saw nothing.
And so James, he
backed in at the
Rod
& Gun Bar and worked over
the
way he’d come, the rest of us
quiet
for her
who
was quiet for something
other
than we might know.
Her black hair an
old nest of wind
and
her stiff, stern hands singly
on
each knee were a testimony
to
what?
A small house,
small money,
small
children?
Coming past the
Butcher turn
around
which the headlights would next catch
the
steel shine of the culvert
that
let Big Run dribble its way to the river,
she
leaned forward and mumbled—
loud
it came in the strained prayerfulness
of
strangers now a part of it:
“Here’ll be
fine.”
“But ma’am,
there’s nothing . . .”
“No, now this’ll
be it here,
somewhere’s
close.”
And above the
quiet of the engine
as
James pulled onto the berm
I
heard the crickets and peepers
gathering
for their nightly rehearsals.
Out the window I
could see her;
shoulders
straight, head turned,
the
diesel-heavy stench of the bus
spilling
over her.
She would wait
and trust,
her
will to believe insistent
and
a part of what she leaves
behind
for me
wishing
to believe like her
that
someone will be there
to
take us home.
