Expedition

She walked until the river split into streams,
streams to creeks, creeks to runs
and the last run like a dark thread
drawing her into the land itself,
into a closed wound.

She had lenses for looking up and counting
the stars and lenses for looking down
and counting springtails in the blackened leaves
and some that were only mirrors.

She penciled entries on the pale
machine-drawn lines of her journal –
the first morning bird (indigo bunting),
the way alder leaves were chewed and tattered.
At first she ignored broken beer bottles,
plastic jugs impaled on branches,
until they disappeared.
“One tire in the water,” she wrote,
then left the rest of the page blank.
“A girl’s hair ribbon, brown with algae,”
and she walked upstream, the ribbon
waving behind her, a single meager thread
useless in the great maze of the land.

Once people came past her camp,
sang hymns
washed in the blood of
the sweet by and
nearer My God
and she thought they were angels
until a voice broke and she cursed
them and their victim.

The moon came night after night,
round then horned.
When there were clouds then the sky
was a perfect swollen gray,
like the inside of a ball of wool.

A hunter stood at twilight on a ridge,
listening to distant hounds.
He tended a fire, stirring it with a stripped
and broken limb. Sparks whirled up.
He might have worn a red plaid coat,
a letterman’s jacket with demons
or dragons, something extinct,
might have worn leaves for leggings
and braided vines.
She watched his movements
until he became a figure
marked with a burnt stick
on the wall of the sky,
jumped into life by a fire’s emaciating light.
She turned to her own small flame.
Her arousal spiraled into the night air
and extinguishment.

The land shut around her.
She tried to climb the bluffs
but found the way too vertical,
treacherous with abrupt springs,
spalled stone and clay.
The water no longer seemed to flow past
but knot and tangle, a black net
heaving in the rapids, at the narrows.

She fished with a line twisted
from her hair and knotted
to a hawthorn hook, caught minnows
and ate them quivering whole, their silver eyes
seeing the way down her throat,
scales clinging to her fingers
like the light of the absent moon.

In the fall came a flood. Her books,
pages long sealed with mold and fungus,
went like unearthed coffins
on the brown tide.

She ate lethargic ants
and grubs with useless fat-man’s legs,
peeled the bark from cherry trees
and chewed the green lining, like the frayed
lining of her coat.
She killed a belling hound lost to the hunter,
and fallen as she had
to the bent snare of the land.
She seared its flesh over a fire lit
with alder leaves and berry canes
and fed with the litter that accumulates
on the upstream side of a leaning snag.

The trickle of water was a gash in the frozen land.
She wore the dog’s hide on her blackened feet
and the dog’s head on her own,
fangs permanently bared.
She watched ice creep out from the banks,
knit itself together the way
bones heal, swords cross,
random marks of the unlettered
are sent tongueless to the future.

Reprinted with the author’s permission from Wake Wake Wake (Press 53).

This Place

The bearded stranger chants old name:
Davis, Bennett, Hoy, DeGroot,
families twice removed, forgotten like second cousins,
their farms parceled
and the names they set here
tailing off like the farm road to Davys Run,
gone to a depression in the running hay.
There were two ponds, one above the other …
Only the one now, sulphurous, shrunken,
the higher pond drained down to marsh.

And the long field we planted in corn …
Hay grows now, and around the sickle curve
at the back, a stand of dogbane.

The others were in wheat, my father
drove the horses that pulled the thresher …

At the point of woods was a persimmon tree,
look for the fruit after frost …

What this stranger knows with his feet
and the reach of his arms,
what I can’t recognize or is no longer there –
even the flats where hogs
rooted up a Confederate belt buckle
(so he says, and I want to believe)
are overgrown with box elder, sassafras,
crabapple, ash, trees stem-green
as grass, so quickly
the land throws itself into forest.
In the meadow I find
coal and limestone, fire slag.

That was where we shod the horses …
The Cutlip places sifts into its foundation
and my dogs go in and out the windows.
I lived in that house,
by the flats, below the fields.

We hold to it
like the mole whose pale hands
knew the ground better than either of us
until it was turned out, broken,
belly up under the porch
where the post begins to settle,
its hands palm-up,
narrow and thumbless
like the warding hands of saints.

Reprinted with the author’s permission from Wake Wake Wake (Press 53).

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About Valerie Nieman

Valerie Nieman’s third novel, Blood Clay, is newly published by Press 53.  She is the author of a collection of short stories, Fidelities, from West Virginia University Press, and a poetry collection, Wake Wake Wake.  Her poems have appeared in Poetry, New Letters, Blackbird, 5 A.M., and West Branch, as well as two chapbooks and several anthologies.  She has received an NEA creative writing fellowship, two Elizabeth Simpson Smith prizes in fiction, and the Greg Grummer Prize in poetry.  A native of Western New York State, she graduated from West Virginia University and the M.F.A. program at Queens University of Charlotte.  She teaches writing at N.C. A&T State University and is the poetry editor for Prime Number.