The Ground Beneath Us – Wild Echoes section head

Joe Wilkins

Nesctucca

a part of the river or a point on its banks or the people of the river (Staguash)

So offshore volcanics & an epoch of ocean

sediments kiss & uplift, rotate & tip

into mountains.

So never-sleeping rains nick & notch & carry away

mountains. So the season deepens.

Winter rivers run backwards

silver-red with salmon, black-eye & thin-bone

mountains. So snag, deadfall, debris, & rot—

& these mountains grow trees

of unspeakable size. Redcedar, fir, & spruce

hold great boulders in their roots, swish

their swishy tips

& deliver the weathers. Each is a green-shining

star, each feeds

the greener universe. By all accounts,

they are adored. Then by my kind cut. So

mudflow, fire, thermal die-off, leached nitrates. So

I tromp up this river of howling

atrocity

& down. Sprawl on a wing of gravel bank

my whole self out. I grieve, believe.

The Only Worthwhile God a Kind of Wakefulness

This rock-ruffled sleeve of canyon skirts

scarps & hoodoos, breakaway ridges

& stone windows. Scree slopes spill

clean to the creek’s snowmelt flood ruts,

bright, tiny stars of whitlow grass, lashings

of red willow. At our backs the coyote sky

makes of the playa a bright, lying lake,

& far, far below run dozens of miles

of uranium tunnels, the toothless maw

of the mine when we stand before it

the size of a child. Not this one, but this

one—my daughter, who shakes her head,

who straightens up to her full height.

Ours Are the Only Hands

Sunflower, Mississippi

In those days, at the edges of the fields, I began to see

in the cypress & tupelo stitchwork of light & shadow,

the face of God. Egrets winged like words away

from me. Where Church Street gave way—every trembling

morning he was there—an old man sat slumped

on an overturned bucket. He watched me

drive a highway I know you know from all the songs.

When I say God I mean of course the songs, the day aching

into itself. No matter the season, that light

honeyed beans & cotton & fallow alike, shone dandelion

& rose on broken irrigation tiles, shovels

booted into ditchbanks & waiting.

Joe Wilkins is the author of two novels, The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die, both of which have garnered wide critical acclaim. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and five collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994 and When We Were Birds. A finalist for the First Novel Prize from the Center For Fiction, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and the Orion Book Award, Wilkins has won the Oregon Book Award, the Montana Book Award, the GLCA New Writers Award, the Pushcart Prize, and four High Plains Book Awards.

https://joewilkins.org/

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