Devotions Over and Over
Appalachian men and women: their weathered hands, the horseshoes over their doors, and the angels that watch over them.
AFTER ALISON HALL’S FIELD GUIDE
This m“hands behind hands”—Thomas Hardy
This ministry of bones, pencil marks fragile & flawed: you can see the quiver in the hand.
The soft lead spreads, rock that it is, back to the first scraped line. Stars fall across altar
boardsboards.
They become stitches against death, reinforcing the fact of death. The artist makes her
boardsdevotions
over & over: we must pray without ceasing. Endearment of plaster, of rabbit skin glue,
boardsbinding
agent boiled down, a protein derived from grass, from the chase, the heart beating fast.
These wooden frames were built by men who learn early on not to show what they feel.
Daddy was a craftsman too & his daddy before that. Hand-rubbed: dust & heat building up,
blown away by human breath, pluming out & down—inhaled. Two generations ago, these
boardshands
would have thumbed the first yellow seedlings of spring, threaded a weft, pieced scraps of
boardsfabric
together to keep babies & old folks alive. Her grandmother tatted a bedspread big
boardsenough
for a marriage bed or to wrap a body in. And it’s a trick of history these hands
now measure the space between Giotto’s stars. The meditations of dead relatives (sharecropper,
loom watcher) culminate in chapel art. In a cold room in Germany, Piedmont sky (Southside,
Bright Leaf) throws its light into the world. Her touch is sometimes tremulous.
These are carpenter marks.
FOR MAMA ON HER BIRTHDAY: A COLLECTION OF SUMMERS, LATE 70S
Remember the trailer.
Remember the dirt yard. The light
is still sifting through the leaves
of your father’s sighing trees.
In the late afternoons, between
your shifts in white shoes,
we would watch Looney Tunes and Guiding Light,
and then go to the Village Mart
for Dr Peppers in tall glass bottles,
hotdogs that stained the buns pink.
Just down the road, Philpott Lake
lapped the banks of Bowen’s Creek.
We would go swimming in wet denim.
Remember the taste of that water—
green, a little gritty—
and the shine it left on your skin?
THE FOUR HUNDRED ANGELS OF HENRY COUNTY
My firafter Philip Levine’s “On My Own”
My first cradle was the moss inside
a stump, deep in a forest
where chestnuts still grew.
The wandering cow
found me, led my father
to me & her hidden calf as well
& we came home
in a muddy-kneed parade,
game for the path,
game for the gate
swinging open to greet us,
tick-trefoil hitched
on my rough blanket, the cuffs
of my father’s jeans,
the cow’s switching tail.
I was held in the crook
of my big father’s big arm.
I am told he was happier then.
I kept a swatch of that thin
K-mart flannel for a quilt
I’ve been meaning to make,
along with the tiny pink rosette
on the tiny pink bodice
of my mother’s one bikini,
for I was a baby born on the
warm waters of my mother’s
man-made lake, flooded
over an abandoned iron mine
& the old fires rose
through green water
& entered my veins
& though I was a lonely child,
I was also free, my mother
sleeping off third shift
on the sofa while I drew
red birds, blue birds, & robins
beside her. She’d wake
long enough to fix an awkward wing,
curl their feet around a branch
& tell me never to erase.
Dogwood blossoms grew
to full size under my crayons,
my father taking me fishing
when their petals started to fall
on the Smith or maybe I never
fished, but had the rod
handed to me just after
the rainbow struck.
IT TAKES GETTING OLD TO FINALLY BELIEVE IN TIME
Mama said ten years would pass like that and they did I slid
into a marriage it was not a long Sunday though at times it was garden-light
blowing through the window the February day our daughter must have been conceived
and three times now we have packed up that iron bedstead and bent our mattress
through new doors never feeling the echo of new rooms until it was time to go we lost
our horseshoe somewhere along the way left it rusting in the grass we kept it nailed
over our door for all those years a cup to catch our luck
Annie Woodford is from a mill town in the Virginia Piedmont. She is the author of Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019). Her second book, Where You Come From Is Gone (2022), is the winner of Mercer University’s 2020 Adrienne Bond Prize and the 2022 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cutleaf, MQR Mixtape, Gulf Coast Online, Southern Humanities Review, and Appalachian Review, among others.