Mountain Music

(Riley Puckett)


The fiddle, the yodel, the harmonica & the fife,
The drumskin, the flintlock, pack animal & knife,
The zither, the whistle and autoharp give life,
A great eye fluttering open in the deep forested host
Driving back Covenant, Cherokee, revenue's ghost.

The 78, the 33 & the 45 spin like
The rhododendron holler on its axis, to survive
Meant breathing the dissonance like so much pollen, not to fit
The rosin to the bridge or the finger to the mercury mind
Was to awake in an ancestor's grip, so clammy and unkind.

The singing dead glide through the layers as if tunnelling to France,
Their keening like the insect wail of an old thermos; to dance
As Bobby did, with one hand waving, shark-like above the shit-
Strewn beach of history, as they say "free", to unencumbered crawl
Beneath barbed wire, past parish dogs, around the bloody wall.