And then, like most people eventually do,
I discovered my childhood.
As Walker says, write about your childhood, and, boy, did I
go to work on that one and wrote several poems
about my childhood.
Fortunately, childhood is finite and the language is infinite,
so there are things after your childhood
and you can still write other poems.
This poem is called Dog Creek Mainline,
and it's the first poem that I'd written that I think probably
no one else but me could have written, because.
No one else sort of lived it.
And it's about a town in North Carolina called
Hiwassee Dam, North Carolina.
The landscape, if you saw a movie
called Deliverance, the James Dickey movie,
that was filmed about 50 miles away from where this place is,
and it's that kind of completely dense, lush landscape.
And I lived there when I was five and six years old,
and I liked the place very much, and I
was trying to remember it, and, of course,
as in all things with memory, you
change it to fit your own situation,
however you want to feel about it.
And I kept trying to recall it, bring it back, and I did it--
at least in the poem, I was doing it imagistically and then
geographically, and then I thought lyrically,
and then I still couldn't do it, and so I'll make a comment
on that and then I make a comment
on the whole process of writing a poem, which, of course,
you're never supposed to do, so I thought I'd do it.
There are place names in here like Ducktown and Copper Hill,
real little towns around Hiwasseee Dam.
I don't know why I called it Dog Creek instead of Hiwassee Dam,
except I guess it sounds cooler to be Dog Creek.
Hiwassee Dam's kind of weird sounding too.
Dog Creek Mainline.
Dog Creek.
Cat track and bird splay, spindrift and windfall,
wood rot, odor of muscadine, the blue creep
of kingsnake and copperhead, nightweed,
frog spit and floating heart, backwash and snag pool.
Dog Creek.
Starts in the leaf reach and shoal run of the blood,
starts in the falling light just back of the fingertips,
starts forever in the black throat
you ask redemption of, in wants you awaken to, the odd door.
Its sky, old empty valise, stands open, departure in mind.
Its three streets, Y-shaped and brown,
go up the hills like a fever.
Its houses link and deploy.
This ointment, false flesh in another color.
Five cutouts, five silhouettes against the American twilight.
The year is 1941.
Remembered names, Rosendale, Perry, and Smith
rise like dust in the deaf air.
The tops spin, the poison swells in the arm.
The trees in their jade death suits,
the birds with their opal feet shimmer and weave
on the shoreline.
The moths, like forget-me-nots, blow up from the Earth,
their wet teeth breaking the dark, the raw grain.
The lake in its cradle hums the old songs.
Out of its ooze, their heads like tomahawks, the turtles
ascend and settle back, leaving their chill breath
in blisters along the bank.
Locked in their wide drawer, the pike lie still as knives.
Hard freight.
It's hard freight from Ducktown to Copper Hill,
from Six to Piled High.
Dog Creek is on this line, indigent spur.
Cross-tie by cross-tie takes you back,
the red wind caught at your neck like a prize.
The heart is a hieroglyph.
The fingers, like praying mantises,
poise over what they have once loved.
The ear, cold cave, is an absence,
tapping its own thin wires.
The eye turns in on itself.
The tongue is a white water.
In its slick ceremonies, the light gathers and is refracted
and moves outward over the lips, over the dry skin of the world.
The tongue is a white water.