goin’ back up home

Sun July high over the riverbend
we gathered on Ray’s floating dockwood
down by old Martha John’s
dangling our feet in the Swannanoa’s
cool, muddy water, running
family names around on our tongues:
Lonie Viola, Effie and Absalom
Elmira Hooks, Beulah Toy Haney and Kale.
Recalled the day Mater took a peach switch
to Delwin and Viola Mae, for swimming
the width of the river right here
when they could have gone under
like Uncle Burton, only seventeen.
You bent to scoop a handful of dust, just
as you remembered it, fine
and light as flour from the riverside
by the clapboard homestead
where all the kids were born to the water
And the mines, where the dirt lanes still dip
to the valley and end, where a boy
could take his pick: brickyard worker,
miner, farmer, boatman. Shiny square of coal
you found on the bank and slipped
in your pocket: the earth here grows it.
How Grandpater toted his bucket
into raven-hearted underground
day after day, the sunless dust
filling his lungs.
Pater, away for weeks at a time
built dams and dredged the channels deeper
a man always digging here--the clay, the dust
the rivermud, another grave--mining bottomless motherlodes:
water, brick and fuel, the Great Beyond
the river passing over itself
like glass, the women at home
with their chickens and switches and quilts.
You thought how each fist-sized riverstone
like an egg or a hard seed
would make a finer marker than the gravestones
in the cemetery on the hill
and you wanted to pluck one up
make it your own with a kiss
throw it back to the river
ask the children to scatter your ashes
like dust on the water
some day when the sun is high.

Judith Toy