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312 LISTEN HERE LIFE AND ART IN EAST TENNESSEE from Old Wounds, New Words: Poems fom the Appalachian Poetry Project (1994) I had read in National Geographic how in Alaska, or some places like it where chill mysteries winter, people stand on ice ten months thick and see fish glint far beneath shivering the deep green with their speed. I stood on creek ice one windfall of a subzero day skating thin and bladeless on a dare. Dreaming of parkas, the huskies' bark, a fish-hook gleaming carved from a fat walrus tusk, I saw only the bent brown ribs of the old year's reeds like a kayak skeleton breaking up in the backwater. Whatever I saw or didn't in the mud, come spring and full summer the creek overflowed with tadpoles, snapping-turtles, water-bugs, the green wink of a lizard disappearing. I kept one eye peeled in hopes of cottonmouth, water-moccasin as I kneeled in the weeds, sleeve hiked, feeling in water brown as tobacco for the least thrill of minnows shimmering between my fingers. ...

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