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Ray Allen SORGHUM HARVEST As the day goes swiftly your life goes unlike the plodding horse following the lead pole slowly turning the sweep keeping the mill rollers in motion methodically crushing the cane. With summer waning you feel your life passing unlike the slow ooze of cane juice strained by burlap unlike the slow barrel fill beneath the boom pole's turning turning while you think of planting the seven seeds to a hill the first sight of shoots emerging the upward growth of stalks and leaves the thinning of the stalks the sun and rain and red seeds hardening leading to this harvest of which you are a part watching the cane juice boil from green to caramel. The summer is ending but there will be the thick pour of sorghum on hot buttered toast. 24 Three Poems THE SEARCHER You see yourself the process of many books: Gatsby searching his dream. Hopelessly gone for years you hold on to what might have been, go on with sunless eyes like a windmill retracing yesterdays. Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. You have grown by their intrusions, shared the ruin of their burned-out generations. You think of Dickey's voice, his Southern Comfort, his Deliverance: no more the rapids, just the civilized and lonely world of his last wolverine climb. Somehow you have come to see yourself there among dead branches. For a long time now you have seen yourself the man dying, regretting the untold stories and Kerouac dying fat in Florida. In childhood these hills loomed higher. Now they seem smaller, easier to climb than before you saw Kilimanjaro white capped in the sky and walked its ancient lava flow remembering the leopard way out of its place up there frozen. 25 APPALACHIA revisited Though no solace remains in the hollow veins of these hills, you look back, just as empty, to memories pressed in firmly as dragonfly wings in coal: The face of the child by the curtainless window haunts you: split rails make gray fences. The child's eyes peer out retelling the saga, searching the road for the return of the father black against the snow. No solace in such memories you search the backroads again, seeing the sumac's candelabra flame against the green of summer with Queen Anne's lace by the roadside. MEMORIAL Alice Greer McNew Like a single tombstone, on a creek bank stands a chimney. There, the doorstep, hollowed by comings and goings. Here the hearthstone, hallowed by warmth and use. Great backlogs blackened furthest stonesDid the father set his boots to warm through freezing nights? (Not too close, for leather was dear.) And the children draw nearer the grandmother's rocker To beg a slice of winter apple from her pan? Or bring cloth scraps to put themselves into their mother's quilt? And did the grandfather whittle here, Shaping play-pretties for the young ones, telling yarns, And singing lengthy, mournful tunes? Crumbling chimney, remainder of their presenceTracks in time, imprints in stone, The tears of a thousand rains cannot wash away the sorrow, Nor the warming sun revive the vanished laughter. 26 ...

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