Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

Many Waters

LLEWELLYN MCKERNAN 421 MANY WATERS from Many waters: Poemsfrom 'West Virginia (I994) Nothing in my house but pale blue foliage furniture dryas chalk and dusty, and tiny paths that lead to bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, jammed on both sides with books opened by the wind and mulched by good intentions. I do not trust the light that comes through the windows nor the pantry where canned goods are stacked from floor to ceiling nor the one recipe with "darling darling" written all over it. I only trust the rain, how it vanishes then reappears the same yet different. Once this spring after a storm the basement flooded, a natural disaster that left in its wake strange plants hooded like cobras and during a cloudburst this summer hail big as jawbreakers tumbled down the chimney (inside them were seeds: sunflower, alfalfa, mung bean). 422 LISTEN HERE And now that it's fall and I'm a Jill-in-the-Box whizzing from love letter to laundry, ironing board to ironing out the flaws in a real estate contract, scattering here a toe there a nippleOJ Out of a ragtag bobtail sky a hissing and a murmunng builds in the long yellow funnel of a cloud that swells, pregnant with strife, and a dark streamlined cry spreads its wings, getting louder and louder, wheeling like a plot, chockful of the quotidien, getting wild-eyed and in heat when it reaches my level: thundering through trees, crashing into windows, spmnmg rooms around on their stone foundation. The roof pops like corks out of champagne bottles as the rain shouts down the house with its jiggers and I rise, drenched to the bone, luminous, whole, bringing out from under the lumber all the family silver. ...