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Nickajack Cave
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
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297 f r o m t h e j u i c e n i c k a j a c k c a v e Your recollection burns in my lantern, shadows me down this ancient ear. My eyes relax in darkness for your sight. My hands touch stone that wears water and I am almost out of sight now almost gone, but listen for me. I mean to be lost for years surviving to come out somewhere telling a tomfool story to filling stations and chenille shops that will have heard it before: beneath this place your version, you long drink of water, is yodeling like a bloodstream, garbled sleeping sound. ————— You are here beside me wondering If I know where I’m going. You are there inside singing to a swarming room. You are the survivor who found another way out. The cave itself is nothing but your skull. You take me past the ribs and kelson of a pleasure boat through the broken teeth of an admission stile to where the audience doesn’t remember you with bear hugs for a stranger—to blank holes filled with history: • • • 298 f r o m t h e j u i c e the Nickajack tribe and the Union troops and myself fallen shattered from the ceiling. You stand with me like sleeping rubble dreaming of form, and you nap in these cubbyholes hanging upsidedown folded in a brotherhood of yourself. ————— This cave confuses us. Meld of rock and dung and water. Our voices blend in a noise that tumbles the lock of the hill and lets us out—in a chord that starts the sacred harp again humming in the earth like a dynamo: What wondrous love is this O my soul O my soul ...