SEQUATCHIE VALLEY

The long road makes slow curls

around the floor of the valley

on its way to the highway,

a leisurely ride past precarious

old houses with chickens and dead

cars in grassless yards. Kids shuffle

around the edges in rough clothes

and wait. On the other side

is a new farm with bright green

machinery and smooth plowed fields

ready for corn beside a spring born

under a uterine shelf of layered rock.

The Cherokee were run off that place

a hundred fifty years ago, and in their

haste abandoned fire rings full of ashes,

charcoal, and arrowheads

by the pockets full. In the spring,

when the dirt is freshly turned, and

after the first rain I walk the rows,

eyes down bent at the waist. I pick up

the evidence of their passing, and add

the stone tools and chips of flint

to my collection and hold them in my hand

as a way to connect with annonymous

men who donated something of themselves

to my distant awareness.

I spent an hour or so the time I first saw

the place, and from the edge of the rock

pondered the clear water welling up from

the dark cavern to make a sudden creek

twelve feet wide and a foot deep that

washed a bed of smooth gravel sparkling

in the dapples. A bobcat glanced its way

down to a pool twenty yards along to spend

nervous minutes, while its tongue flung dropletts

as it drank, and later, three deer cast their eyes

over their shoulders, but never saw me.

It's funny how you can tell when your time

in a place is up. I fired the bike and

a mile down the road a rabbit darted

in front of an oncoming pickup and

in a slow motion instant, I saw exactly

the sudden explosion of head and shoulders

slammed with iron. That red nova of energy

and life flashes through my imagination

in a random repetition whose meaning,

I'm afraid, I have discerned is something

that requires consideration.