Yonder Mountain: An Ozarks Anthology

Andrea Hollander

Andrea Hollander Andrea Hollander was born in Berlin, Germany, the child of American parents stationed overseas after World War II, and raised in the United States. In 1977 she moved to Mountain View, Arkansas, where she and her husband built their own house, raised their son, Brooke, started a natural foods store, and ran a bed-and-breakfast. (They divorced in 2011.) In 1991 Hollander became the Writerin -Residence at Lyon College, and in 1993 she won the Nicholas Roerich Prize for her first poetry collection, House Without a Dreamer. Other honors include the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the Runes Award, a Pushcart Prize for memoir, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Arkansas Arts Council. Her other books are The Other Life, Woman in the Painting, and Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982–2012. qQ Finches or Sparrows First the wheezing wind, and then I saw them, hundreds it seemed, yellow and brown and yellow-brown. I wondered how they knew to fly in such parallel lines and so fast and together simultaneously from the shaking hickory the wind had disturbed, straight out from the tree 99 so fast I couldn’t tell which they were, finches or sparrows. Then the wind hesitated for a moment the way in that final bed my mother seemed to, her chest still, breath suddenly gone for a moment, but actually held in—savored, I thought later— the way her body had tried to hold me a little longer, the cord that had kept me alive now wrapped around my throat, pulling me back the way all those years later I wanted to pull her back. And now, outside, the wind wheezing again like her breath escaping from her chest. There was nothing I could do to make her keep it, those birds— finches, sparrows—moving so fast I could not tell which. Then the wheezing stopped, the wild, invisible gods released them, and I saw I had been mistaken: All at once they dropped, fluttering to the ground, nothing but leaves, yellow and brown. Large Boulder Above Honey River If you look closely: a tiny crack in the stone that to an ant must seem a chasm. Closer, you see a procession of scurrying insects smaller than ants. Think of winters there. Think of their intricate dwellings, 100 Andrea Hollander their roads impossible to detect, tunnels thin as hairs weaving into their deep cities of blackness where the roots of this old sycamore help to open the earth. The river isn’t really a river but a creek my grown son named as a boy. The name stuck. Ever since the ice storm, I don’t come much. Too many toppled trees, the difficult climb down from the cliff. Thick tangles of briar. Snakes. But today I’ve come anyway. In part for memory, in part to listen again, to experience something humans didn’t make or say. A hawk hovers for a moment on the other side, then rises and circles away. A single branch of the sycamore shivers above me, likely a squirrel I cannot see. Then for a moment, nothing— no movement, no sound. This far from the house, no news to read about, no radio to turn off. No terrorists. No wars. Andrea Hollander 101 November When a young, tailored woman walks into the old general store on Peabody, the old men forever gathered by the potbelly stop jabbering long enough to take her in. And even though they go on with their mouths full of autumn talk (deer stands and guns, the finished cattle guard), with their eyes they take a quick shot of her, each man pressing it away, the way all year he keeps the odor of morning up in the stand, the taste of outdoor coffee, the first trace of sunlight shivering onto the mottled Ozark ground, even the slight snapping sound behind him in the tree when a squirrel lifts to a higher limb. Then—just picture it—a buck, perfect in the clearing, but staring up at the stand and into the man’s eyes as if he were someone it knew, his rifle at rest against his cooler, the rest of the story embellished now among his friends, like the story he’ll tell himself in bed tonight about the way the woman looked at him, nodded her head, the subtle...