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Luci Shaw
Canaan Valley, October, 2005
We’ve come to expect it from trees, but here
even the ground blazes, packed deep with leaf foil
red as red gold. Driving, at every turn in the road
we’re jolted by another roar of color—whole hillsides
belting out the flush the sun had invested
in West Virginia foliage all last summer.
I’m hearing a story from 1910. Settlers here, determined
to clear the land, cut down every tree along
the mountain’s backbone. They had themselves pictured,
triumphant, standing on stumps. When
the exposed leaf-peat caught fire it burned away,
burned clear down to the limestone bones of the hills.
This morning the defiant blaze of fallen leaf on every side
campaigns for revival. No cautious pigment,
just the bright brush of a view through the car window
that sweeps all the old years’ records clean.
This kind of flame refuses to go out,
to join the lost history of leaves.
Oceans may muddle salt with fresh so that
sources are forgotten. Glass cannot tell you
from which of millions of sand grains it has been melted
and cooled to clarity. But mountains are made
of memory, eons of it, an ancient narrative held tight
in the rocks; their deep hum of survival a sostenuto
all winter, inaudible to us. But come spring, we’ll know
to watch for a green fire singing along the hills again.
Luci Shaw is the author of The Green Earth: Poems of Creation, Water Lines: New and Selected Poems, and many other books. Her next book of poems, What the Light Was Like, will be published later this year by WordFarm. She is active as a workshop and retreat leader on poetry and journal-writing, and lectures widely on topics related to the creative process. She lives in Bellingham, Washington. Learn more about Luci at her website, www.lucishaw.com.
Copyright © 2006 Luci Shaw. All rights reserved.
This page was published in March 2006
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