Zone Journals Read Online Free PDF Page A

afternoons.
An iron-spiked and barbed-wire jut-out and overhang loomed
just to my left.
I always sat as close to it as I could.
    Â 
    I remember a woman I saw there once,
in March,
The daylight starting to shake its hair out like torch flames
Across the river,
the season poised like a veiled bride,
White foot in its golden shoe
Beating the ground, full of desire, white foot at the white
threshold.

She stared at the conched hillside
as though the season became her,
As though a threshold were opening
Somewhere inside her, no woman more beautiful than she was,
No song more insistent than the beat of that white foot,
As she stepped over,
full of desire,
Her golden shoe like a sun in the day’s deep chamber.
I remember the way she looked as she stood there,
that look on her face.
    Â 
    â€” 27 March 1985
    Â 
    â€”Such a hustle of blue skies from the west,
the pre-Columbian clouds
Brooding and looking straight down,
The white plumes of the crab-apple tree
Plunging and streaming in their invisible headgear.
April plugs in the rosebud
and its Tiffany limbs.
This earth is a plenitude, but it all twists into the dark,
The not no image can cut
Or color replenish.
Not red, not yellow, not blue.
    â€” 9 April 1985
    Â 
    â€”Draining the Great Valley of Southwest Virginia
and Upper East Tennessee,
The Holston River cuts through the water gaps and the wind gaps
In the Stone Mountains and Iron Mountains
Northeast-southwest,
a trellis pattern of feeder streams

Like a grid from Saltville in the north
To Morristown and Jefferson City in the south
Overlaying the uplifts and folds
and crystalline highlands
That define and channel the main valley,
Clinch Mountain forming a western wall,
The Great Smokies and the Unakas dominant in the south.
In 1779 it took John Donelson from December till March
To go from Kingsport to Knoxville on it
By flatboat, a distance nowadays of two hours by car.
All of my childhood was spent on rivers,
The Tennessee and Hiwassee, the Little Pigeon,
The Watauga and Holston.
There’s something about a river
No ocean can answer to:
Leonardo da Vinci,
in one of his notebooks,
Says that the water you touch is the last of what has passed by
And the first of what’s to come.
    Â 
    The Cherokee called it Hogoheegee,
the Holston,
From its source in Virginia down to the mouth of the French
Broad.
Donelson’s flotilla to Middle Tennessee
From Fort Patrick Henry
—one of the singular achievements
In opening the West—
Began from the Long Island of the Holston, across
The river and upwind of the fort.
It took them four months, down the Holston and Tennessee,

Up the Ohio and Cumberland,
to reach Nashville,
The Big Salt Lick, and the log cabins of settlement.
    Â 
    Intended by God’s Permission , his journal said,
Through Indian ambush, death by drowning, death by fire,
Privation and frostbite,
their clothes much cut by bullets,
Over the thirty miles of Muscle Shoals,
Loss of the pox-carrying boat and its twenty-eight people
Which followed behind in quarantine and was cut off,
Intercepted, and all its occupants
butchered or taken prisoner
Their cries distinctly heard by those boats in the rear,
Passage beyond the Whirl,
the suckpool by Cumberland Mountain,
Slaughter of swans, slaughter of buffalo,
Intended by God’s Permission …
    Â 
    Imagine them standing there
in full headdress and harness
Having to give it all up,
another agreement in blackface,
This one the Long Island of the Holston Peace Treaty,
Ending, the first time, the Cherokee Nation.
Imagine them standing very still,
Protecting their families, hoping to hang on to their one life.
Imagine the way they must have felt
agreeing to give away
What wasn’t assignable,
The ground that everyone walked on,
all the magic of water,

Wind in the trees, sunlight, all the magic of water.
    â€” 16 April 1985
    Â 
    â€”April, and mirror-slide of the fatal quiet,
Butterflies in a dark confusion over the flower’s clenched