Tellico Plains

Tellico Plains not the man kept land. . .but the land ofclear blue mountains —George Scarbrough, Eastward in Eastanalle Yesterday, we drove to Tellico and sat beside the river beneath the blue hills and I thought how even though the river is clear like a crystal, there is always something we can't see, sometimes a poison, and how the whole earth... is trying to cleanse itself always and continually like a snake rubbing against an oak limb, wanting to shed its skin, to seep gleaming out of the old one, before flowing away like the river and how the blue mountains. . . rise like a punctuation to the idea the world can be what it wants to be but won't because it doesn't know how to shed its old skins, hasn't yet learned what is inherent in the blue snake and the blue hills and the blue river and I thought... there might be some words, some collection of phrasing I could lay on a page, just right, that would say it all, explain how to do it, how to rub ourselves against the bark of the earth to leave our old skins behind how every poem ever written. . . has tried to do just that and how awful it hasn't worked so far and was wondering if it ever would when I thought maybe it is working and the whole world is becoming a poem, but so slowly we can't see it like the river flowing full of secret things and I thought. . . maybe it will happen if only the words do not get lost, if enough people become poets: not really, but like me at that moment, sitting beside the river, beneath the blue hills, shedding my old skin. —Frank Jamison 100 ...