Driving Behind Rose in North Carolina
I follow my friend after the memorial of our mentor.
We pass tarpapered fishing shacks along Brasstown Creek,
where I’d be too prissy to stay but can imagine
fishermen happy as trout.
The backbone of the highest ridges beyond us is still brown—
thinner air hanging onto winter.
But down here, fallow fields bloom yellow.
Rose would know what it is—she who relishes bare feet in soil
and communes naked with the midnight moon.
There’s the decayed mill declaring KEEP OUT,
then a makeshift Boiled P’Nuts stand with its bubbling 55-gallon drum
and the occasional red-dripping REPENT nailed to a tree,
which always gives me, though I know better,
the every-hair-on-my-head heebie-jeebies.
In the last ten minutes, I’ve seen three over-zealous groundhogs,
dead, so I tell the live one on its hind legs in the ditch
don’t cross, honey.
Curls of razor wire glint in the jail yard’s sun,
and a white-steepled church proclaims:
Cars aren’t the only thing recalled by their Maker.
We see fewer Confederate flags these days, thank goodness.
But here are some draped on a rusty truck by the roadside, $10.
Before Rose and I met, friends kept claiming you’ll love each other.
I know she’s recording the valley’s life too—
the way our poet-mentor taught us. The way our words outlive us.
Rose and I hug the curves like best friends, a cord from her car pulling mine
past black cows in grazing posture, white faces down,
her listening to Prince, me to Pavarotti—voices rising
from the same marvelous mind that greens
these farms and mountains come spring.
(First published in Chautauqua Journal)
Morning, Blue Ridge Mountains
Waking without a view
other than palpable gray—
an alpaca blanket pressed against
windows.
Fog born of humid-rich currents,
cooler water touching warm air
held between the ridges.
Sitting in the silence created
when sense of sight is gone.
Disappearing into liminal space.
And if a silhouette materializes—
an angler in his low jon boat—
still the silence, untouched.
Then witnessing the gift of color
emerging: scraps of blue sky
and of sky reflected in blue.
The music of waking:
geese beginning their antiphonal
oboe calls down shore.
Kingfishers flitting railing
to rigging, their telltale rattle
like tambourines.
The kettle whistling, a prelude
to cups from the French press
forming their small fogs.
The household’s hesitant hum
breaks into song.
(First published in Blue Heron Review)
What do you save
when a wildfire swarms toward your home?
Ten-thousand acres last week, double today. The Nantahala Forest
combusts like hay: drought plus rough terrain. Bless firefighters
who’ve come Oregon-far to help the Blue Ridge. Bless everyone
praying for rain, damning
the arsonist. These mountains should flame
with autumn; instead, falling leaves become torches,
wind-carried, hell-bent.
Not morning fog, this scrim over my view, but smoke
the sun can’t burn off. Eyes itch, I taste acrid hickory,
won’t let the dogs play outside. Farmers fear for cattle—
the thick smolder, chemicals sprayed to stop it. What about lungs
of gulls here for winter refuge on Lake Appalachia?
And osprey, fox, bear, deer…
Eight miles away, police at my friend’s door: Evacuate. She packs
her sister’s sculpture, mother’s portrait, binders of genealogy notes.
I could grab documents but not
Reverend Cobb’s table cut from a hundred-year oak,
nor the maple desk made by a local man.
The mattress with its imprint of the body I loved.
There’s an odd beauty I don’t want to like,
the smell of campfire, the silver-ringed sun, striated
purple sunsets. I’m in a Turner painting, everything blurred,
obscured under goose down.
Last night the moon glowed red.
(First published in No Such Thing as Distance [Terrapin Books, 2018])
Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books are: No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich). Poetry credits include The Writer's Almanac, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, Glass, and Plume. She’s also a freelance writer who teaches creative writing at various venues such as John C. Campbell Folk School and the Blue Ridge Writers’ Conference.
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