Reason No. 2

Oh, my poor abandoned blog!

Well, no use lamenting the lost years. Here's a re-start:

Reason No. 2: Because context is everything.

A broken jar lying in leaf litter. What does it mean? Is it litter? Accident? Artifact? Here's a poem about just such a discovery.

Still

In Randolph’s machine shop
the stilled grey lathes and presses
glimmer here and there with slips
of oil. His floor is spotless

as his white shirt, worn
with cuffs snapped back from
wiry brown wrists. A yarn
spun with the lathe warms:

My daddy sometimes was known
to weld up a still, he grins.
He’d pretend and go along
with whatever wink and purpose was given.

Still and all, that was the way
the old-timers got around and along.
And it still is today.
Some things, over time, still strong

as double-run corn. Like
Randolph’s will, like love
for the burn, that likker-spike
beyond flavor. Granite, up the cove,

shelters places those old fellers
gathered fire and copper
between springs and laurel hell.
The still life we stumble over

lies broken in the loam
up in the forks of Blackbird
not far above the old home-
place, between the fords:

Two tubs, some pipe, a jar
shattered, half-buried, tipped over.
So still here. The road’s far
down the cove and across the river

The life of corn and fire
and defiance even farther.

Rust the distillation
of rain time and iron

Runs red into the red clay
of the creekbottom today.

Above the overthrown still,
how still the poplars. Still

And yet