State of Mind   

And now I miss you Appalachia like coal trains
and a thousand crickets dawning on the outskirts
of memory.  Memory?
My mind has become an analog of eroding mountainous
landscape--a topographical maze only fiddle tunes and
men from deep earth understand.

Where are you Cambs two years ago on a
Friday afternoon?  Trips to the 'legger past
two hundred trailers, twenty six farms and fifteen
strip mines and sat up cooling off those hot Kentucky 
nights on cold Budweisers.

And where are you Julip with your backroad-county
girls in denim cutoffs and checkerboard cotton shirts?
I speaking urban phrases like "whadda'ya names?" in the
presence of sweet dialects running smooth from the lips
of iced tea smiles.

It's quiet now Appalachia
Your mines quiet in the bust.
Your hills quiet in the night.
Mam'aw gathers up the young ones like farm eggs
and lets them snack on hushpuppies and RC

while here watching barefoot undergraduate girls in white bikinis
from urban dreamland fire escapes
I wash down calzone with cold Iron City

and think about when Jimmy passed on how half the county
came to pay their respects to one whose death was as
unpredictable as the mine explosions and floods those
Cumberland mountains have known over the past century
and a half

thinking about the time during pledging when Byron
and I tore that big old Coke sign down off the side
of a hill on 25e and packed it off on the roof of 
Ditillio's Monte Carlo

thinking about how Boyd took us out-of-state college
boys in as his own--
would loan us a twenty like second nature
and always end a conversation with a "drop on by anytime"

and thinking about how Appalachia wraps itself
around you like the aroma of Chelsie's cornbread
and you begin to think of it as home
from a thousand miles removed in one mind.

                                 1983