Appalachian Berwick’s Wren

I burnt a wren’s brambles,
some hilly thorns with heaven
there on my crowded paths.
Soot was frozen in its voice.

It was farm work clearing
for wheat. It was father’s plan
bristled and green at sunrise.
Its songs nestled through stone.

I’ve heard nothing all spring,
stumps smolder, tractors grind.
One noon, it rustles silence,
wren to ghost, ghost to wren.

**

Perriman Mauber

He’s born a fire’s riddle on a thorn hill.
He’s dying while March sleet sings his house.
His children may ask him nothing like twine
knotting through glass, unraveling in clouds.

“Do not look!” his mind says to white light foolery.
“Do not stack the pine slabs upon the embers.”
“Look cold where the heart keeps alive, watch it
quitting like a rusty-hinged gate, a grafted tree.”

Such a slow-fenced farm shook into a name,
and some of it keeps shaking his hospice nurse,
her mind the orchard of his mind, her smile
closing his eyes upon saints, and prize plums.

**

Hiroshima

The earth when hell dances
begins a shadow false with birds
and false with hepatica blooming sleet
down Carter’s Ridge. I imagine today
my Uncle in the Philippines, the prison
road spilling the cries of sparrows
and a stray shot from a nervous guard.
I imagine old man Austin, another
island, and him guarding a secret thing
loaded on a plane, and a pilot who keeps
swearing the world will change forever,
the earth will burn its own air away,
a child will look at this old man’s photo,
one beer in hand, greeting what might lift
the future, the soldier now in a hurry
toting a bag of oranges across his yard.
He picked them for me yesterday in Florida
a state so distant I hear an orchard freezing there
from my snowy house, and I watch clouds
flurried against Ingles Mountain, and more clouds
above some place else, Hiroshima, very close
upon our silence.

**

New Year’s Riddle

A voiceless body walks home
and lifts fool light across the porch
then shakes its dust, word by word,
through our eyes. It has no home.

The winter tupelo sheds the stars
and makes our sky begin falling
like another body we cannot keep.
It is soon a smoky hill sent home.

Or it’s born here wobbling away.
Some friends knock its face near.
Some enemies wriggle snowflakes
across its mind. We find it gone.