Time’s Weave
Rent from DeepDyve- Time’s Weave
Somewhere in these woods a child was buried under a pile of white rocks, but every person who could find that spot now lies under their own stone.
We walked this back stretch looking for something that marked a life, not a death. My mother recalls nothing of the time she lived there, just three years old,
at the bottom of this sloping meadow grown thick now with young poplars. My father knows the direction better than any of us, having strung
new barbed wire along Ike Johnson’s old posts, slow work done by hand, on foot. We find a sugar tree with a black trunk, three hutches for whiskey stills,
a pit deep enough to have been a well, yucca plants in a straight row. No sign of the house, though the years rise up, tiny bones feeding their limbs.
We make three generations in the flesh, three short strands in time’s long weave. Late wind shifts, and my daughter runs ahead– the woods are full of foot steps. [End Page 120]
Jesse Graves grew up in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, a community his ancestors settled in the 1780s. He teaches at East Tennessee State University and is coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee, due out in early fall 2013. His chapbook, Basin Ghosts, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press, and the poem in this issue will be included in that book. He is the author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine (2012), which won that year’s Weatherford Award for poetry.
