For the Living: (Jim Wayne Miller)

hiking a shaded trail, savoring the long views and the acid tang ofrhododendron all around me and die chilly glossolalia of a creek falling away. I'm exalted yet hidden, and utterly content: it's as if all these ridges, including the one I'm walking on, harmonize perfectly with my inner geography—perhaps the geography I absorbed long ago, growing up in the mountains. For the Living (Jim Wayne Miller) The sun slants hollow in the oak tree stand where he and I once stood. Shoots of may apple have come and gone and autumn is upon us. Others have walked alongside us: students, poets, lovers, all eyes and ears as he swept his hand, his pen, across the creekbed of this living. The path we took back to the barn lay covered up in acorns. Pressed into the soil by the sole ofhis shoe, they took hold and climbed, in the shelter of the briar. Hoes and plows, steel bits, a harness tether us to the corn crib. Our words pile in like cobs. The brittle husk, gone to dust, scatters, filtered and floating in the air. —Pia Seagraves 19 ...