Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, and Its Day Being Gone, from Penguin Poets, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. She is co-editor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, from University of Georgia Press, and the journal Southern Humanities Review. McLarney has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences; served as Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place; and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. She is the Lanier Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.
Lyric Essays draw on poetic literary devices, including imagery, music, word play, compression, and extended metaphors. They often invite the reader to resist linear thinking. We are thrilled to have Rose McLarney’s stories as our first installment of lyric essays.
Mountain Music
When I parked at the high school, I’d back up the CD. I’d think ahead to departure, so a track I wanted friends to hear would start with my car. We lived in a rural county and driving is what there was to do, me holding the CD player plugged into the tape deck, to steady it and lessen skipping on gravel roads. It didn’t matter if the other high-schoolers and I had any tastes in common; geography determined the few people to whom we could be close. We drove to talk, or to tell each other to shut up when the good parts of a song came on. To not really focus on the Appalachian scenery tourists came to view while we tried to discern what we could from each other’s expressions in profile. The lines of those features, and the ridges behind—
X. had pressed play and fast forward and pause and record to make the best mix tape I’d ever heard, but I didn’t know that until I’d listened to it for over a year. I borrowed the tape from my prom date, who’d gotten it from a friend, who’d gotten it from a friend, who got it from X. He’d graduated (barely) long enough ago that he’d had time to move away and come back with this music, Aphex Twin and Sonic Youth with measures of pretty and hard that were marvelous to me, a dissonance I played with constancy. The kids my age called some of it pure noise. I forgave them for not getting it, not being cultured yet. Pure noise is a phrase I like still, for the idea that purity might be things crashing together.
When I finally met X., learned the tape had originated with him, he became my first true love. X. showed me how to match beats and scratch records on the turntables behind his mother’s cans of green beans in the basement where he stayed. He took me across state lines to warehouse clubs where he lifted me (not yet 18) over the back fences. I remember one night, as I waited for him to make his way through the door and bouncers, standing at the edge of those pogoing for the band I’d come to see, I watched two drag queens dance over from the adjoining venue. They formed hearts with their hands that they beat at each other. Their gesture, unlike the fist-pumping with which I was familiar, still converged into a shared romantic affair.
X.’s uncle had a game camera trained on the creek that played into the kitchen, not to spot deer, but to funnel in the audio of the water. From this, X. might have learned to be an outdoorsman. Instead, my first love acquired his love of electronics. His version of nostalgia was getting a VHS logo—in memory of the videos that had taught him to speak with no Southern accent—tattooed on his arm. Or so I was told years after, a piece of information I record by inking it sentimentally on the page.
X. and I broke up decades ago, I don’t keep in touch with my old friends. What I have stayed true to is my home, the mountains. When I speak of the landscape I love, people seem to think of Appalachian culture isolated from outside influences, hidden in coves and hollows, a preserved, nobler, closer-to-the-land way of being. I doubt they picture scenes such as my memory of riding up steep roads going to a party with DJs held in a cave. Pill bottles rolling on the car floor marked the climbs and descents with their percussion. I was all sensation, feeling sounds as pleasure to my skin. It was no wholesome experience of nature, this leisure so unlike the labor of settling families who dug into their places by farming and with coal mining. But this was formative, and a part of those guitars and synthesizer, me as X.’s passenger, are what others must love if they love me now.
I learned of ballads from adaptations, weird spins on them by contemporary musicians. After I finished high school and moved to the city, homesick, I’d ride with Will Oldham’s voice as my companion: Cow-call, and they were all calling together /Describing the way to go… /Withdraw, withdraw you live so far from town. Missing X., I’d turn to Oldham singing, If I could fuck a mountain, I would fuck a mountain, so indelicately. Desire, of course, is impure and ideas of chastity have always existed alongside dreams of breaking it.
My first love knew how to catch an Atlanta college station’s signal if he parked at just the right angle outside our hometown Kmart. One evening, he mentioned the parking lot used to be his grandfather’s apple orchard. That must have been the start, of wishing to go back to before I’d ever left, or the era before I existed, back to the earth below the pavement. Though I was also facing the road that had yet to carry my body to universities where I’d learn and teach, to my husband and final love. Why is love, if measured by fidelity, supposed to mean never speaking of, seeming to show a capacity for utterly forgetting, earlier passions? A good refrain hooks you, a good ear remembers.
So I listen for the wind in the fruit trees, the bees. Sometimes, the closest I can come to hearing them is in radio static, in traffic. I doubt I’ll ever be in the range of X.’s voice again, though I think of him often. I try to keep in mind that the pollen that clings to bee’s legs is the substance of another species’ reproduction, nothing too clean. The bees, painted and flocked by flowers’ extrusions, carry that potent gold home, faithful and humming.
Reintroduction
An elk stands in frost that flashes like smashed glass.
Though I suppose the metaphor should be constructed with what came into the world later referencing that which existed first. So: Crashed cars’ broken mirrors along the highway side possess something like the glitter of frost.
*
The elk stands in the auto shop’s parking lot.
Rather, the auto shop, the highway, and every house to which it could be followed have been built on what was elk territory before humans came, hunted them down, and, by the 1800s, crowded them entirely out of the Eastern side of the country.
*
Reintroduction is what importing elk—to give them another try—is called.
Importing them from where they survived to where they were eliminated, where they would have never chosen to be absent from. Reintroduction—as if they are guests prone to forgetting names and must be led through the same handshakes all over again at each party they attend.
*
Today is the first time I’ve encountered an elk in my home state.
Also, today is my birthday. I’ve come home to visit my parents. It’s late enough into life that the date has begun to feel more like an annual redundancy than time for a celebration.
*
Their numbers increasing beyond expectations, the elk are making great progress.
Ranging beyond the parkland they were given, the elk are already considered a problem. They are slowing traffic as they travel by road, coming down from the mountains to graze on grasses, and on corn, on rare occasions.
*
Humans have written laws to provide protections. These say it is illegal to kill an elk.
However, if an elk is in a man’s garden and he shoots it, he is unlikely to be charged with a crime, or even an animal replacement fee. An exception to the law is made because it was encroaching on his private property.
*
Animal replacement fees are supposed to compensate for the losses—of tax dollars and the pleasure of elk sightings—of the citizenry.
What impedes traffic, by the way, is cars of gawkers stopping as the elk continue to walk.
*
These days, I run slow. I won’t wear a watch to see how much longer the route takes me now than it did at another age.
What I want is to go back to past times, my knees high-stepping then. Or back further to crawling on them. Maybe then to push back human clearing and construction, sweeping error from the land. Though that would have to include my own family’s home.
*
This elk has pushed ahead beyond the rest of his kind to find territory another buck hasn’t already claimed.
That is why he isn’t a part of any herd. The trouble is, where there are no competitors of his sex, neither are there females. Only ground lonely as this is uncontested.
*
Is there, in the spread of the elk yet to occur, reason to hope for what’s ahead?
Think of the elk. Think several generations on, my body, already past its time for speed or breeding, entirely gone, when there has been time for more elk to wander here and fill in the space.
*
An elk’s eyes perceive movement more than shapes in detail. I keep still. In his eyes, I can disappear by staying in place.
No, more than elk see anything, they rely on listening. I could describe myself as being at a dead stop. But I am still breathing, revealing myself in that way.
*
I remember how I was shown I was welcome in this world with singing and flame, year after year. So many childhood birthdays with cakes. The candles as bright as the rays refracting from the frost now.
Day will melt the frost’s beauty. But then there will be, again, the full, direct, and original light of the sun. And wouldn’t most people be glad, shouldn’t I be eager for the warmth, expect better ahead?
*
I stare at the elk, standing by a highway with lanes to follow in either direction. I should believe that the way he is looking is eagerly to the future.
Or, given what I know of elk’s senses, I should say, more likely, he is listening for the future to come. Hearing the drum of a hooved harem running over the hills, the nearing of does.
Instructions
for Completing a Cemetery Survey
Study the tombstones and make no changes or assumptions regarding missing or seemingly erroneous text, says the guide for historical society volunteers.
So I record only 1876-1___ and do not guess what the latter figures are. Only Ponder and do not venture to make the blurrier shapes a first name.
Do not assume because two people are in the same plot that they are married or otherwise related. Report that they share the area but avoid making up what the relationship is, the guide further instructs.
I note Breedlove, Breedlove and do not suppose wife, mother, daughter, or______.
To discern worn letters, Hold a mirror at 90 degrees to the side of the stone. The obliquely angled light should make the engravings’ shadows clearer.
I’ve come alone. Still, I carry a makeup compact, always. Think of mistakes and questions: How do you spend your days, where will they end, will there be a shared lot, partner in what, buried by and bearer of who? And turn the mirror to my own face.
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