The Hurricane of 1940

The Banner Elk Hurricane of 1940

The pure water of Elk River
runs turning and leaping down
the ancient rocks of Avery County
like the last deer wild of the woods
flees, not touching a rock or tussock
of dark earth, rich with the promise
of the new year beneath the slanting
rains of spring that soften even the
hardest heart. In the turning of the year

of 1940, the people of the valleys of the
mountains, in the thin air near to a mile
high, waited for the rain to end, so they
could clear boggy patches of cabbage and
feed shower-pale cattle. But they did
not know the land itself was full, saturated
as the lightest heart takes love, deep as the
rocks of Brown’s Mill Pond, across Proffitt’s
Knob, not seven miles as the shrew tunnels,
but a life away. The people waited in the

imperfect shelter of roofs, under cedar shakes
and bent rafters until they heard the roaring
sky river and felt the earth move as a
coiled panther, stretching its buried spine and
leaping until it cleared itself of all pretense,
twisting around the house-high boulders above
cabins that had stood for two-hundred years,
shaking itself like a wet cat, shuddering
mud and trees down sharp hollows. The breath

of this storm from far oceans swept houses
clean as the trees of autumn, without the deep
colors of death, and wrenched timbers and windows
from their places to settle in new ravines where
the mud, like a mouth of earth, ate them, leaving
only splinters of people to marvel at the new slopes
scented with the breath of far, salt seas.. The few
who could speak of this had no words, but
quietly collected the infant who had been buried
head-deep in the spoilings and the father swept three
miles to Cranberry where he was found draped on
the plank of a bridge just lacking a pipe and rocking
chair to make him a home. Others were broken and

battered like the gneiss and granite boulders new to
light among the soft droppings of earth black as the
mountain’s heart. They took them on trucks to Boone,
wading waist-deep roads turned suddenly to streams
and battling passages through hells of laurel and hemlock
as if the land wanted them too early for its new dust and
felt cheated of their flesh. The few were saved, tortured
by scars, and returned to the hills as deer to the beds they
know, twisting themselves in a coil of familiar sleep, and
planting cabbage shoots among rows of corn with snap-beans
set to climb the stalks, but the children of children of the land,
remembering the fickleness of the beast inside, straining to get out, left the stale
hills for jobs in flat cities, returning to dig trenches they filled
with gravel and perforated black pipes in the illusion
that they could control the meandering of water, the presence
of earth, the dark certainty of death.

Daddy Jim's death poem

Black Jack

Daddy had a mule he bought
When he was all of eighty two,
For he said that he ought
Not to sit home with nothing to do.

He lived in Mountain City
After selling Proffitt's Knob
For nine thousand, hard money,
And he missed the parts of a job.

But more he missed the seasons,
The feel of the plow in his hands,
And he had to tame the demons
That kept him uneasy off the land.

So he went to the county fair
Held way down in Johnson City
And found a mule with jet black hair
And a slim leg that made him pretty.

He kept him in an old tin barn
Along with his feed and tack,
Just a stone's throw from the new home
Away around the back.

I'd often find him in his field
After he got a tobacco license,
And he got a pretty good yield
That he sold at the Burley warehouse.

He worked that mule the day he died
In his armchair in Mountain City.
As his life, his death was a surprise,
But the mule was sold, a pity!