Serpent Mound

. . . you walked with the hand-planter, its belly filled with water. She wore a loose blouse and a burlap sack which held the plants .... . . . she walked backwards, half poking, tossing the plants into the planter's mouth as you clicked the trigger. Water gushed. The tobacco blossoms, sticky, bobbing still Through the waving heat. What is most impressive about Stephenson's long poem is its range of style, tone, and consciousness, and the weaving of lyricism, imagery, and narrative to produce a whole tapestry. This interlacing of prose and poetry blends memory, wonder, and a desperate longing to realize a man apart from his relationship to the surface world. The father in Stephenson's poem "never budged from his assurance," but when that inflexibility is checked the speaker remembers how his father swore he'd never have an indoor bathroom bcause it was "Unsanitary!" Yet "Winter came that first time in the new house/ And that little room was his favorite one" (VI). Serpent Mound Up a serpentine road we wind to the booth where we pay to see the restored shrine. After parking, we stride in silence beside the mound, the grassy, mowed ground where bones and spirits lie. The day greys as clouds cloak sun that shone only moments ago, and my mind grows dark while a drum thuds a distant rhythmic totemic tattoo. It's night. I soundlessly pad moonsilver grass, hushed, invisible beneath quilted sky, Luna a closed eye while my blood's tambourine jangle ignites me till I quiver, an arrow bound for Deer's heart. Unlike his father ("I can see you wave off the big questions/Like a firstbase coach"), the speaker in The Persimmon Tree Carol asks the big one, but admits, "I can't explain that you are not here with me." He asks, 'Wasn't he good enough to live beyond the cancer?"— instinctively suspecting that the "Anticipation of the winding road/ Is one tangled vine/ You always tried to escape " (VII). Ultimately, Stephenson knows that "Hope is forgetting that one's father will be in the deep, running currents/ Forever " (V). And in the midst of that knowledge, finally, The barn is open to the air The house is in the hedge and the hogs gone to the packing plant. I go on asking questions, (xxi) Stephenson is the author of two previous chapbooks. He is the editor of Pembroke Magazine and teaches literature and creative writing at Pembroke State University in North Carolina. —Ann Quails But it's no hunt. I'm weaponless, panting rapidly, tracing a river whose voice rises like wind to howl inside my tidal mind. I see the river's full of half-fleshed faces groaning from gaping skulls, all keening in anguished rhythm, arms flailing, Adena ancestors trying to die. "Bury us, brother," they moan in time to my mind's drumming drone till, sweat streaming, I run, trailing tears of shame and fear. But dark gives way to warming sun, it's day, I'm back and you stare as if you, too, saw those ghosts. Clasping hands, we round the head, start down the mound's shadow side. —Ed Davis ...