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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 KinnellYou 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.
