The Historian’s Wife Describes the Appalachian Plateau

            1939

Dawn Potter

Imagine a massive dining-room table

spread with a damask cloth whose starched

folds are difficult to climb. Once this table-

land was ironed smooth. Then up lurched

Chestnut Ridge, unruly as a soup stain

or a badly darned tear. In those days the sea

came and went, and came and went. When

the waters left, the table was the property

of trees and humid swamps and ferns as grand

as modern man though now he rules supreme.

Then the sea rushed back, and with it sand;

and again the waves fell back, again they streamed,

spoiling the ferns, rotting the trees and their fruit.

Meanwhile, time applied her bitter tinctures;

the careless sea swept in her dustpans of silt.

It was a vast tedium that contrived our future.

[first published in Hawk & Handsaw, no. 5 (2012)]