Dust and Mercy
A poet from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina on landscape, family, and how we’re obligated to both.
RED SKY AT MORNING
Most days in June
I can picture
the cold burning off
the backs of horses
along Rominger—
not Mustangs
but Appaloosas just as wild
—and smell the dew
on field grasses,
like the waxed
gymnasium floors
of my childhood,
the squeal of shoes
on the surface like
the quick ringing of bells
at the Presbyterian Church
no matter how far
I go from home.
There’s an eyelash
on my glasses
and I leave it there
in case I am desperate
enough to make a wish
on my father’s grave;
just a shovel full
of dirt and the ash
ageless as any question.
This morning, I’m
watching the dawn
cover the moon—
an American moon,
a kneecap busted open
to the bone. A dove turns
through the air
with a speed which startles,
so used to seeing her
at rest on the power lines
and here she goes, wings tucked
like daggers across the sublunary air.
If there is a paradise, I’ve seen it
once or twice out here—years ago
and the engines going quiet
on the main road through town
and the snows and frozen waters
reflecting the stars—almost
too glittery, too real.
And on earth, nailed
to the limits of my body,
I’ve had plenty of excuses
to turn my eyes anywhere else.
There’s rain coming on.
I hear its approach, all at once
a warning, through the maple,
beech, and ash.
LISTENING TO POSSUM RADIO, THE ANTI-INDUSTRIAL GIANT OF THE MOUNTAINS
An hour ago I wasn’t writing this poem
but driving you around while you slept—
the shade and sunlight dragged through
the February trees and banded across your face,
flickering like a candle’s flame
against a socket of wax,
sunk low, or maybe the breast feathers
of a hawk which moved overhead as we passed
an empty field, our lives just a wink under her
open talons and the last clammy steam
of snowmelt thick on her body,
almost lacquer, as she lands on a power line
stretched across the hillside. There’s a neglected
house just off the road, the paint chipped badly,
chimney stones busted out; the mailbox gone
and all the unanswered bills of dust and mercy
piled up against the door. Months
will come and go then years. One day soon
you’ll realize the truth—how
we go in circles through the countryside—
you’ll think, “I’m older now, what gives?” and I’ll
take the axe out to the woodpile and split
a few pieces of locust until they are finger thin
or else be writing this poem again
and you will look out with the strange sense
that you’ve been here before. The radio
cuts in and out—a station from Kentucky
playing requests for the imprisoned
and I turn the volume down low enough
to hear your breathing over the afternoon.
Matthew Wimberley grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. The author of two books, Daniel Boone's Window (LSU, 2021) and All the Great Territories (SIU, 2020), Wimberley's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Agenda, Poem-a-Day, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Wimberley teaches at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.