I.

If only for a moment, it is all 

around your route through Madison County—

white farmhouses, weathered mobile homes, graves, 

dust barns, churches for the graying remnant.

 

Acres rise from shadowed to sunlit green, 

purple-green up to the blue, overgrown 

with old trees, new potatoes, tobacco, and weeds. 

It smells of dirt, flowering fields and woods. 

 

Here the earth is too steep, too full of stone, 

for much beyond subsistence farming, sleds, 

and ideal spots for satellite dishes. 

Husbands and wives work garden plots in twilight. 

 

II.

Dice once clicked and sprang from mountain men's hands. 

Silver coins clinked in blue pockets and gray. 

Some women displayed naked ankles and 

soft bosoms for coins not lost to the dice. 

 

Other women birthed boys born to leave 

for the mills of the North, the lore of the West. 

This leaving went on like years of foreign war. 

Some came back wounded, some never returned. 

 

Walnut survived until new road came through—

one stretch of new road, two hundred yards long. 

Cut off by the bypass, emptied and lone, 

our Hotel Switzerland quietly died.

 

III.

By church steps strewn with whittle stick shavings, 

spit, and peelings from beer bottle labels, 

in the shade of the old hanging tree, 

it's Homecoming Day. Our women baked bread 

 

all morning, preparing to serve dinner 

on the ground for the prodigal souls' meek 

return—

native soil still under their nails 

from fields now fallow (widows undressing in rain).