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dec 2022 / gambier, oh


Anti-Dawn

I stood on that mountain
For what i knew to be the last time.

It was a quiet November but for the wind down the valley
And the birds who hopped along the naked rose bushes.

I thought i heard Hutch there with them.

The tears, i wiped them on each branch
Of the mountain laurel where the ashes were spread

So that a part of me might also stay.


It is calm now, the trees around me still chime like
those ancient white oaks, though i am hundreds of
miles away from my home in Virginia. But i hear the
warm familiar song and she hears mine.

There is so much unknowing in me
But i know that i am welcomed here.





nov 2022 / madison co., va


Dawn On Old Rag Mountain: A Good Manners Field Guide

          000:    A gust of breath is always the first thing. 

          005:    The sparrows begin the roll call: chip...chip...chip. 

          016:    A sip of coffee is audible. I, too, am present. 

          021:    The first warbler is heard in the distance 

                  singing imperfect fourths. 

          033:    be-nęw-nęw, be-nęw-nęw, be-nęw.  

          036:    The cardinal, my mama's favorite, is awake. 

                  In the morning we are strong and porous. 

          040:    The junco and the wren join in together, 

                  The sun, surely on its way. 

          055:    The sparrows are alone. 

                  Last night the deer would not let me in their family. 

                  But i followed them, my footsteps soft and pleading 

                  and they brought me to my home and stopped 

                  as i stumbled through the door unconscious. 

          059:    A sparrow sighs, the wren returns, 

                  i have yet to learn the many faces of friendship. 

          063:    The wind smothers and beats my ears. 

          074:    I hold onto the wren's song 

          080:    & it brings me back. 

          092:    My hands shuffle into my pockets. The dog has found me, 

                  he drops his ball at my feet and groans. 

          095:    I walk to the mossy stream, the only water i have ever known.




feb 2022 / gambier, oh


Farewell Usis, farewell gentle evergreen watchkeepers

I always hated goodbyes. The superfluity, the melodramatics. I hated them until last summer when i stumbled upon a grove of stale tree corpses about an hour outside of Asheville, N.C. There was a gaping hole in the canopy through which eerie sunlight blared straight into my watery eyes. The mountain stream still ran, but it was too warm for any brook trout. The whole place smelled of death. A storm of realities hit me at once, and suddenly the superfluity of a farewell felt sensible, even imperative; no Shakespearean adieu could have been dramatic enough for this moment.

Here i will make peace with loss by attempting to make up for the goodbyes i never said aloud, and to find fulfillment in saying them.

The difference between evergreen and deciduous trees, according to Cherokee legend, is one of persistence and willpower in seeing an ordeal through to the end. So it was for Usis the eastern hemlock, whose lopsided crown indicates that its growth was marked with adversity.

For a mightily resilient eastern hemlock, this word — adversity — feels far heavier than for humans. Judging by its record-breaking height, Usis likely sprouted during the rule of Genghis Khan, then lived for centuries in the total shade of the dense Appalachian understory, waiting for a vacancy in the canopy above. Apparently the only opening in that time was inopportunely slanted, yet Usis nonetheless grew up and outward. It reiterated its limbs and grew new trunks out of them until Usis, now the tallest hemlock ever recorded, loomed high above the Cataloochee Valley and the surrounding Smoky Mountains. Perhaps this gives you an idea of the persistence possessed by this particular hemlock tree.

And perhaps now the whole picture becomes slightly easier to handle, for the fate of Usis only makes as much sense as its unlikely thriving. We love comfortable stories of impossible triumph, but must accept that with them, naturally, comes equally senseless decline. Nature persists, and we will laugh and cry and write stupid stories like this about it. That is how we make sense of a constantly changing earth.

So it was Usis who towered high above the Americas, through the Age of Discovery, the Second Industrial Revolution and war after war after war;

who still stretched its dense foliage until its shady grove was an entirely new ecosystem and kingdom of its own, a green moist oasis preferred by white-tailed deer, yellow coral fungi, hellbender salamanders, the rapidly disappearing piratebushes, and dont you forget the black-throated green warbler, whose cry youll hear in Gambier at dawn, and who is known to stubbornly nest almost exclusively in hemlocks.

It was Usis who watched the coming and going of our folk heroes - felt the thud of John Henry’s final hammer strike, heard the crash of Casey Jones’ last ride on a southbound ten-wheeler;

who watched its people be exiled and conquered and slaughtered but still stood tall so that the nighttime wailing elk, whose routine path crossed through its shady grove, could use the familiarly intricate crown of limbs (‘Usis’ is the Tsalagi word for ‘antler’) as a waypoint, wiping their snot on Usis’s lower-drooping branches and grazing onward;

who could only watch in silence as the American chestnut gradually gave way to plague, and still stood tall as the plague began to feast upon its own species, and eventually on Usis itself;

and it was Usis who, when foresters finally discovered it in January of 2007 and hastily began their healing procedure, knew sorrowfully that it was no use. Men can kill a giant, but only a god can save one. When hemlock wood burns, it howls and crackles like gunfire. Usis was silent by November.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight
Stand like druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 'Evangeline'

The eastern hemlock, whose adumbral mystique will forever live on in Appalachian folklore, has indeed become a dying species after infestation by the invasive woolly adelgid in the 1950s. The fight since then has been a losing battle.

The 19th-century poet Ann Sophia Stevens wrote of her late friend Zadock Pratt, a tanner and hemlock caretaker: 'So the Tanner loves that stout old tree, // ...For well he knows that the hemlock bough // Will weep o’er his honored tomb.'

Who will weep when the hemlocks have all gone?



originally published in the Kenyon Collegian