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ART FAIRS
L. WARD ABEL
The Shoulders of Lumpkin East
'I can hear
in the wet wood the snap
and re-snap of the same embrace being torn.'
Galway Kinnell
You wouldn't even know the place.
A lot of years have passed
upon my revisit for the nonce with wife and girls.
That forest of spindly pines
was once cornfield
where Fred and I found many a piece
of pottery, with stickfigure and sunray markings,
arrowheads revealed after the annual plough;
an Indian village had been there
hundreds of years before
and we were boyhood-witness to its remains. Now
two old housetrailers appear strewn among the needles
and left to fend with their isolation nearby.
On the site of our Grandfather's cabin
beside the lake,
(the cabin long ago sold by my Father)
just at Lumpkin Road's end
some small homes
have been erected;
his toil of brick, rock and steel
not even a relic, replaced with lesser strata.
Along Lumpkin's dirt verge
where we'd picked blackberries for Grandma's pies
is a gray cake of overgrown dormant kudzu, poised
to cover the right-of-way. Pocks in that road
are selective in their jarring: I glide across some,
am slammed by others, like growing up
and blocking out. But away it wears. On and on.
My eyes
adjust to this as if suddenly walking indoors
from a blinding memory, and I tell my daughters
about the sensations of artifacts,
about revelations from the plough.
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