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KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER 87 MOUNTAIN TIME from Black Shawl (1998) News travels slowly up here in the mountains, our narrow roads twisting for days, maybe years, till we get where we're going, ifwe ever do. Even if some lonesome message should make it through Deep Gap or the fastness ofThunderhead, we're not obliged to believe it's true, are we? Consider the famous poet, minding her post at the Library of Congress, who shrugged off the question ofwhat we'd be reading at century's end: "By the year 2000 nobody will be reading poems." Thus she prophesied. End of that interview! End of the world as we know it. Yet, how can I fault her despair, doing time as she was in a crumbling Capitol, sirens and gunfire the nights long, the Pentagon's stockpile of weapons stacked higher and higher? No wonder the books stacked around her began to seem relics. No wonder she dreamed her own bones dug up years later, tagged in a museum somewhere in the Midwest: American Poet-Extinct Species. Up here in the mountains we know what extinct means. We've seen how our breath on a bitter night fades like a ghost from the window glass. We know the wolf's gone. The panther. We've heard the old stories run down, stutter out into silence. Who knows where we're heading? All roads seem to lead 88 LISTEN HERE to Millennium, dark roads with drop-offs we can't plumb. It's time to be brought up short now with the tale-teller's Listen: There once lived a woman named Delphia who walked through these hills teaching children to read. She was known as a quilter whose hand never wearied, a mother who raised up two daughters to pass on her words like a strong chain of stitches. Imagine her sitting among us, her quick thimble moving along these lines as if to hear every word striking true as the stab of her needle through calico. While prophets discourse about endings, don't you think she'd tell us the world as we know it keeps calling us back to beginnings? This labor to make our words matter is what any good quilter teaches. A stitch in time, let's say. A blind stitch that clings to the edges ofwhat's left, the ripped scraps and remnants, whatever won't stop taking shape even though the whole crazy quilt's falling to pieces. ...

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