Appalachian Autumn

Forgive me, but I cannot help posting a portion of this poem.

Wm

--

From Appalachian Autumn*, by Charles Wright

....

Wherever I've gone, the Holston River has stayed next to me,
Like a dream escaping
some time-flattened orifice
Once open in childhood, migrating now like a road
I've walked on unknowingly,
pink and oblivious,
Attended by fish and paving stones,
The bottom breaks like mountains it slithers out of, tongued and
chilled.

The river is negative time,
always undoing itself,
Always behind where it once had been.
Memory's like that,
Current too deep, current too shallow,
Erasing and reinventing itself while the world
Stands still beside it just so,
not too short, not too tall.

There's no uncertainty about it, negative time,
No numbering.
Like wind when it stops, like clouds that are here then not
here,
It is the pure presence of absence.
November's last leaves fall down to it,
The angels, their wings remodeled beneath their raincoats,
Live in it,
our lives repeat it, skipped heartbeats, clocks with one hand.

....

*Wright, Charles. "Appalachian Autumn." American Scholar 74.4 (2005): 75.