Three Views From Pine Mtn.
There are Pine Mountains all over the South. Maybe all of them are worthy of a poem.
1. Pine mountain, cartersville, georgia
Scuffling the scraped iron footpaths in hill country —
Shortleaf pines drop their needles dead, the coal plant spews
late purple fumes, down in the reservoir speed boats
tuck in with the day. This land rises like mounds
more than mountains: plinths for temples, sacred fire.
Its low peaks are the last of their kind, not clad in flint
shrapnel, no longer scraping the troposphere’s bounds
with shale edges. Those little ones packed with privet,
silverthorn, the sharp ends of radio antennas,
sometimes mansions, electric boxes bound in barbed wire.
Those covered in spray-painted pictographs. Those that kids
climb to kiss and grope on, to smother in bottles,
cans, beer and tobacco. Those predating your mother’s
hair, your grandfather’s fingers, the final waking
visions of the late Mississippians. Those who came
before language, song, chorales of new voice swinging
down into vast fields of the hunt. Those who came before
all things except wind and water, which weather the land
with growing strength, without discrimination, and will
erode the sublimity of your Rockies
and Sierras, reducing them down to what all great
ranges become: these splendid undulations.
Outcrops for towers, foundations for basements,
soon a flat expanse of grass…
2. Pine mountain, kennesaw, georgia
Blasted granite portals pave the way through the mountains,
across the Cumberland Plateau, beyond the bending
Tennessee River, revealing boring columns,
hints of those original dynamite intrusions
which laid waste to the continuity of these
perfect ridges. The murky fog of morning fills
Chattanooga’s valley. Heavy mist muddies the siege
of time over the quarries, the iron cannons.
The air rings a battle hymn with lustful fervor,
squashing bloody grapes into this most sanguine ground.
All through the foothills and the minor battlefields,
those same flags fly, flapping against each other
mercilessly: the Union banner bathed in blue,
even that bloody wool cross which still parades
through spiteful streets and out in yards, flaunting its cause.
Coming south through the foothills toward Atlanta,
that tinderbox terminus, smoke from California’s
summer fires wash the skyline in a facade
like burning. This is not the first time the city
has woken to such light, and it may not be the last.
Go to Pine Mountain in Kennesaw, find the marble
obelisk that marks the death-site of General
Leonidas Polk: secessionist, slave-owner.
Watch how the stone pauses to overlook the trimmed
field of his reaper. Watch how clean it is kept,
watch how at night, when the lights from adjacent houses
turn off and forget the cost of that war, someone\
places flowers in his memory. Watch everyone
rise the next day not knowing what is buried
beneath them, what has been clawing to the surface.
3. Pine Mountain, Oconee County, South Carolina
Silt by Little Brasstown Creek kicks up rapidly
in clouds, grinding wheels down the dawn spring valley
mark our passage. Big cattle and open fields
fill the family ranches as new barns get pulled
into frame after years of pounding rain and snow.
The slope is gentle up Pine Mountain, that leveled hill,
low above Tallulah Gorge, home to a federal
radio beacon. Its gravel summit is covered
in hairs of toadflax, Nuttallanthus canadensis,
which grows on roadsides, gutters, sheets of baking rock.
Currahee Mountain rises from the southwest
isolated from other points on the Blue Ridge,
its name supposedly means “it stands alone,”
while smoke from some federal prescribed fire rises
below the mostly obscured and crowning belly
of Brasstown Bald, which is known to be the peak
that braved a great flood. Salvation in a canoe,
foundations for a people again, autumn crops
planted after the head was cleared by a lightning bolt,
though I was once told the tradition goes the people
were building a spire so tall the Great Spirit
knocked it into pieces: shrapnel from some divine
explanation beyond, familiar wrath, a wild
shaking of furious hands and then a barren hill.
What grew tall here once has since been felled. Brasstown
originates from a word that means something like
“Place of Fresh Green,” misheard as “Place of Brass,” printed,
mistranslated on road signs, maps, spoken proudly
off the tongues of those who conquered its verdant acreage.
Even from this point, it’s simple to see how land burst,
pushing earthen fat and muscle into endless
montane forms, or how subsequently floodwaters
surged and left their great gashes: water carving rock,
old story. These peaks are now fit with chain-link fences,
parking lots, houses, our renewed stacking stones.
Lord, we have been building towers for a long, long time.
Carson Colenbaugh is an MFA candidate in poetry at Vanderbilt University. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Hollins Critic, and elsewhere. He was awarded an honorable mention for the 2022 Tor House Prize for Poetry. His writing on ecology can be found in Castanea, the journal of the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society.
Carson Colenbaugh is a poet and forest ecologist from Kennesaw, Georgia. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Terrain.org, Birmingham Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Ecological work of his can be found in Human Ecology and Castanea, the journal of the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society.