Some cast-off cast out of heaven’s barn,
the staves no better than barn planks now,
split and cracked, hoops gone to rust,
its long-throated mouth
with nothing left to tell us,
nothing milky in its old countenance
or smell, just dusty rank,
no glory, nothing rising, nothing coming
forward, everything inside funneling
the long slow long ago, interpreted
in a language that won’t believe us,
a language we’ve forgotten,
the measured tug and pull
like rowing a little boat almost,
like pulling a rope to ring an upside-down bell,
the fossil of palm-imprints distressed
in the long handle someone’s trying
hand hefted up and down,
waiting for the soft give, the soft take,
the delicacy of speckling cream
just breaking the surface,
and then more paddling up and down,
the patient rote response,
the song of how and when,
the repetition and devotion it always takes:
more work, more work, more work, more work.
–
Susan O’Dell Underwood directs the creative writing major in the English Department at Carson-Newman University near Knoxville, Tennessee. Besides two poetry chapbooks, she has published one full-length collection, The Book of Awe (Iris). Her poems, nonfiction, and stories have been included in and are forthcoming in a wide variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Oxford American, Crab Orchard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Ecotone, and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia.