Excerpts from AXE, FIRE, MULE
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- Published: Wednesday, 28 February 2018 23:22
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When they asked him why he failed
to come in with the others,
but stayed out all that moonless
night groping his way along
the hollow’s rocky slopes, back
and forth across its snaky
floor while his flashlight faded,
he would only say the child,
the lonely lost child, making
believe he meant the straw-haired
toddler he finally found
curled with her collie asleep
at the base of an oak, and
not the bloodied, belt-bruised boy
he still is, who haunted the
same hollow and never told.
Irish Wilderness
A wilderness . . . is hereby recognized
as an area where the earth and its
community of life are untrammeled
by man, where man himself
is a visitor who does not remain.
The Wilderness Act of 1964
They wed a priest’s dream to their own and so
purchased parcels of Missouri’s wild land
along the Eleven Point because they
could afford no better. Now we burnish
tales of their vanishing into legend,
gaze upon the great second growth forest
that remains, and shiver for newcomers
who dare enter, nodding to each other
when they lose their way and must be rescued
by locals on mountain ponies. We fail
to remember how our lank ancestors
cleared the first forest in a violence
of axes that echoed the war years when
bushwhackers lived to loot and burn, their paths
swaths of fire that sent entire towns into
exile, Irish pioneers suddenly
remade into refugees fleeing charred
homesteads and war-wild hearts of their neighbors.
Cicero Jack Ponders Relics of the Osage
I’ve hunted arrowheads deep
in Ozark woods, rummaged lengths
of dry creek beds to swell my
cache of hand-chipped stone, layer
the bottom drawer of the
parlor desk with a litter
of flaked flint and chert. But now,
as a killing drought lowers
water levels, turns the rich
soils of lakes and streams, I read
of scoundrels digging bones, thieves
harvesting relics of the
long dead Osage, and I must
count myself kin to both tribes.
I have plundered precious things,
and beyond my final breath
I and mine will be plundered,
soil of my progeny turned
like the loam beneath the lake.