"Barn Deconstruction, New Market, Tenn., 1999 composite silver gelatin; copyright: David Underwood. 

Moving–still. Hands, dust-coated. Memories reeling. Wedged within rows of journals decades old. A faded gold folder thick with yellowing typing paper. "Poems, 1981."

Junior year in college. Finally. I'd arrived. I'd published in our college's literary journal. Took two years to accomplish that feat. Didn't matter that I was my high school's literary journal editor. Rejection was all I got for my badly penned poems. I gave in and took poetry from a great. Before I took Jeff Daniel Marion's poetry class I swore I'd have to write about barnyard dirt to be published in the Mossy Creek Journal. Turned out barnyard dirt was fodder for words from my soul's homeplace. Marion was connected to his native East Tennessee. Only many years later did I realize the wealth streaming from the Appalachian holler that cradled our small institution of learning. In class, I got it: poetry is about depth and not surface teenage angst or love. I reached within and found my own connection with the land of my upstate South Carolina home. And then. That year. I published this in the Mossy Creek Journal. Stuffed in the pocket of that old yellow folder was the old journal, the pages bent backward, marking my poem:

The Barn

Dwarf doors, buckled shut with chains, tree limbs,

or whatever gadgets were near;

Flung open for anxious sunlight,

intrusive rays spotlighting the dance of hay fever dust.

Prickly bales of straw,

arranged perfectly side by side,

wall to wall;

our furniture, we used to say–

an arena for the centered pit

where light yelled upward

and I fell once.

Light peeped through barnside cracks.

We'd spy through

and laugh at neighbors

and watch the maple with light, speckled bark

trade its crimson-red blossoms into wings.

A Cathedral tin housed us

Fall and Spring noons only,

For, in summer, Susie and I willingly loaned our Haven

to green-eye wild cats, bats and slithering varments.

And, in winter,

wicked air forced us

to make Haven elsewhere.

******************************

**For shits & giggles, as The Fiance is fond of saying, I contacted the photographer whose photo appeared on the adjacent page from my poem. Like me, he's no longer a student at Carson-Newman College. Unlike me, Dave Underwood's back there now and serving as chairman of the Art Department. He explains that though he teaches digital photography, he's "an old fart that still likes to put his hands in chemicals." I replied that he wasn't an old fart, he's simply doing Art!  Someone has to do print or we'd loose the art. I admire those photographers still honing the now seemingly ancient craft. When I took photography there, I also loved the darkroom. (Besides, if he's "an old fart," then, so am I. In June I will be 50
years young and Dave is somewhere in that range with me. And, I will not
embrace American cultural prejudices of age!)

I love the fact that Dave and wife, Susan Underwood, were both students with me and are back at our special alma mater. I sat next to Susan in Dr. Marion's class and watched her literally awaken to her life's passion. She is now Creative Writing program head at the College. In August, Finishing Line Press, publishes a chapbook of poems by Underwood, titled From, which addresses where the author is from, where she has been and issues of place.

"The Barn" should have some additional spacing between segments, but Typepad's blog platform, or my techno-ignorance prevented this from happening.