Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Hogpen; Plankroad

R O B E RT M O R G A N Hogpen In the pine woods, at the log enclosure with a roof over one corner, you can get up close to the grunting breather. And he knows you’re there, always watching through a chink. Suddenly whirls his great weight squealing to the other side, for all the size quick as a cat, standing in mud plush. Living out our exile we come as to the oracle with offerings of scraps, bran. Slopped over and gomming his snout he’s after it so fast, snorkeling under, coughing. Licks the trough bare to meal stuck in the cracks, clabber whitening hoofpools. Sun brews the tincture, flies steaming. A scree of cobs bleaches downhill where cans of worms can 78 ❚ The 1970s be dug every foot. It’s a good place to play on a hot day, in the pines, spice of hot needles, resin swelling. Play close to the slow talking panter behind the logs. He listens, taking an interest. Stirs in the inner chambers, blessing the hours. Plankroad Besides the Indian trails and a crude wagon trace the first way into the mountains from the south was a narrow gauge set of timbers on the ground with rough boards nailed across. The clatter of that lumber echoed off the mountains’ wall as teams and carriages from Charleston labored up along the Saluda and into the dark hollows, ascending out of heat. Those sleepers rumbled like trolls under their load and wallowed in the spring mud, drumming to the jumpoffs and high ledges a warning: see maples unfurl and sail on light into spring, see higher up the oaks like ragged beggars carrying diamonds of sap to translate into green. The fullness has come to the cucumber trees along the upcountry creek where floods scoured the underbrush a few weeks ago. The new growth tinctures light where sun has made the soil The 1970s ❚ 79 ethereal in leaves. And solar wind takes flesh in kalmia and chinquapin. The millionaires from Charleston and Atlanta built their mansions in the pines at Flat Rock, and returned each year along the wooden bridge to cool among the columns and hemlocks, and worship in their private chapel. They bought poultry and time from my forebears. Observe the proficiency of sprouts trading in the commissary of mud, now as back when they grumbled from the tollhouse near Traveler’s Rest up to the Gap. Natives walked their planks into the outlands. The wood quickly weathered and warped where it stilted across hungry water and parted thickets. The platforms snapped in cloudburst and fungus in the lowspots ate the flooring like venison. Then they had their Negroes and Irishmen dig and drag a locomotive into the mountains. 80 ❚ The 1970s ...