Newspapers / Brevard College Student Newspaper / April 23, 1980, edition 1 / Page 6
Part of Brevard College Student Newspaper / About this page
This page has errors
The date, title, or page description is wrong
This page has harmful content
This page contains sensitive or offensive material
Pho tos Mary Doyle Sprinklers Six whales surface in the grass between two buildings. Spouting all at once, they exhale mist of caves, plumes of lava smoke. I wonder why they’ve stopped here, after diving into jungles of granite, cruising beneath mountain snowpelts to strain magma through pale baleen. Trees on the lawn drift upright on bouyant roots. Perhaps it’s not whales out of place here. I watch from the walk as they dive down, shapeless, together. Summons I awoke being pulled toward the blue-gray compression of hills, a summons I would answer without question, no matter what threat ingoing, coming back, or the place it would take me. I asked a friend to come, a witness to this lemming’s rush; she couldn’t. I stopped at the view of Bull Creek, overlooking the patched valley of the last Eastern buffalo, laurel thickets, farms hemmed with pine. Poems rubbed me like dayflowers chancing against spiderwort, blooms coupling at curbside, a raw mixing of selves Unsure how to die in grace or live. A boy picnicking with his family brought from his table a slice of melon and offered it to me. I went home confused, flowers and fruit seeming no answer to the summons, no turning point. Months later it came to me, sensing from that urgent day a change, but now seeing the gesture, that hand offering fruit, requiring Ken Chamlee, an English professor at Brevard Colelge, reviewed his B.A. degree at Mars Hill College. In 1976 he received his M.A. in creative writing at Colorado State where he lived for two years. In his spare time Mr. Chamlee enjoys photography, writing, hiking and camping. His wife Priscilla is a librarian in the College library. Poetry by Ken Chamlee Hike The trail dissolves into dust oozing from jackstraw trees, ivork of the careless aphid. Pushing away ferns and stump-spill we follow a dent in the ground cover, guessing at packed leaves, angling down sideways to find Mitchell Falls. Pretending. And then Puritans hacking deeper into Massachusetts woods, pushing back the fringe of their fear; Sickle-Man ripping open tents, flying into sleepers on blade wings; berserk grizzlies in Glacier Park stripping open sleeping bags with six-inch claws; pickups slowing on a Nevada highway, checking your isolated camp, planning a trip back. I close my eyes and start cutting down trees. Each chop recoils through the ax handle and notches my spine but I keep hacking, destroy all places to get lost, leave no cover, wish all wilderness gone. In each fresh stump my face appears, a forest of mirrors; I see everything, run screaming through the waste. The only way back is up through heath-hells and rough gullies clogged with sticks, hand over hand, pulling up by roots through a cloud of flies. I remember Elisha Mitchell, measuring this mountain a hundred years ago, slipping over a waterfall while lost at night, found floating ten days later, his name diffused into stone. In six hours we fell out of woods a century unchanged. The dark grass stung my legs, its cold beads forcing life back, pushing fear down nerve paths and out through pores, sweat of exhaustion and relief. My eyes rolled toward the summit, Elisha buried in a pile of stones, and to that dim trail I would hike again. £
Brevard College Student Newspaper
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
April 23, 1980, edition 1
6
Click "Submit" to request a review of this page. NCDHC staff will check .
0 / 75