Big-Headed Anna at the Ice Cream Social
But Nothing’s Fair after Love
Caedra
Dream Car
Engraving
Last Song
Louise Bourgeois to Her Husband, on Love and Her Father’s Mistress
Mr. Kimberk's Kindness
Mr. Longley’s Paper Suns
Our Father, the Lost Geometer
Performance Art
Persephone’s Blues Song
Piedmont
Regret and Other Bodies
The Crystal Lattice
The House Winter Built
Ways to Mourn an Asshole
Piedmont
Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer
EF-4, Winter, 2011
There are grave doubts
about the hugeness of the land.
—Henry Adams
From the Cumberland Plateau to the coastal plain,
the forest seems nothing but pines—
loblolly, longleaf, shortleaf, and slash,
nothing but overstory.
Silhouetted, tall clear trunks,
high-branched, rough-barked, and heavy-boughed—
everything at right angles.
No dogwoods or redbuds heralding beneath
as a portent in anaphora. And the comfort is in
the uprightness of the vegetation.
But the land half-cleared in Ringgold stands as proof
some things cannot be stopped by mountains,
and the stand becomes a cemetery in stumps and needles.
That the tornado would not hit has showed itself: a myth.
That the Confederate army would afterward prevail, mercifully untrue.
I cannot see the mountain without the breach,
but I cannot cede the mountain either.
The mountain foot leaves everything oblique,
and I am oblique to the land
that I can't live without.
A bright sky intensifies the color of the soil,
which isolates the red from iron,
where once the sea came in and out and in and vanished
as the fall line, as Lookout Mountain,
as Chickamauga, as something screaming.
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There are grave doubts
about the hugeness of the land.
—Henry Adams
From the Cumberland Plateau to the coastal plain,
the forest seems nothing but pines—
loblolly, longleaf, shortleaf, and slash,
nothing but overstory.
Silhouetted, tall clear trunks,
high-branched, rough-barked, and heavy-boughed—
everything at right angles.
No dogwoods or redbuds heralding beneath
as a portent in anaphora. And the comfort is in
the uprightness of the vegetation.
But the land half-cleared in Ringgold stands as proof
some things cannot be stopped by mountains,
and the stand becomes a cemetery in stumps and needles.
That the tornado would not hit has showed itself: a myth.
That the Confederate army would afterward prevail, mercifully untrue.
I cannot see the mountain without the breach,
but I cannot cede the mountain either.
The mountain foot leaves everything oblique,
and I am oblique to the land
that I can't live without.
A bright sky intensifies the color of the soil,
which isolates the red from iron,
where once the sea came in and out and in and vanished
as the fall line, as Lookout Mountain,
as Chickamauga, as something screaming.