In Karst Country, and: In the Deer Wallows

In Karst Country

Footnotes

1. Bats feasting in the stubble-fields on nights of swelter, mosquito-drone, sheets thrown back.

2. Under our back pasture, flow paths and rimstone pools, chambers branching and sponge-like and ramiform—a world where the sun and other luminaries are fables, where the flowers are stones.

3. That world coming near, breathing on us, in these fields rumpled and laced with ridges, fissures, sink-holes, and caverns.

4. Bats as emissaries, messages poured from bottles.

5. Bats unfurling like a parchment that’s both sturdy and delicate, both translucent and dark, “nearly of a London smoke color . . . deepening into blackness,” as Graceanna Lewis observes. Furless, their wing membranes are “so beautifully crimped by lines of blood-vessels . . . as to remind one of the India crape dresses our mothers used to wear.”

6. Bats threatened by our smoke, our filth. Isaac Weld recalls that Madison’s Cave was “covered with soot from . . . the pine torches” carried by the men who gave tours; its petrifactions were smoke-blackened. When Weld emerged, his “hands and clothes were smutted all over.”

7. The abandon of eating peaches, juice all over our faces. The pleasures of tasting, of savoring. Squirrels harvesting a mast-tree, bats eating moths. And water that gnaws stone. And neighbors who come for corn-shuckings or fodder-pulls, for loaded plates, stomping feet.

In the Deer Wallows

Footnotes

1. Boy fleeing his chores, his father who peels a switch from the sarvisberry tree.

2. Apt to vanish when he’s sent to grub and seed, his truck-patch like those A. G. Bradley saw in the Blue Ridge: “small clearings . . . where scanty crops of corn, oats, or tobacco struggled with weeds and briars in stump-strewn enclosures, or beneath the giant skeletons of what had once been living trees, killed by girdling.”

3. Wishing to slip from sight, or grasp, or memory. Like a wooer’s note and ambrotype. Like flint knappers, mica crescents, spat-out bones, button-shanks from a soldier’s coat.

4. He eyes the earth for what’s keepable. Goes to his pallet, to brush meetings and the whipping-oak, with a walnut, or pebble, or dead bee in his fist.