Kentucky Backwoods

From a thousand miles away I can see Appalachia as it was 

when I was ten: the soft old mountains fuzzy in the lowering sun 

the dogwoods and oaks and hickories on limestone cliffs high enough for a good fall 

the hidden streams and hillocks, the ruffed grouse and orange spiders 

and walls of bats louring as darkly as the evening thunderclouds behind them

and--this one time--a butterfly on a poplar branch with more 

wings and antennas than seemed reasonable. It looked kind of like a sea dragon

but we were far from the sea. In fact we-- 

my sister and mother and father and me--stayed in a little town where the 

general store had butterscotch cookies on pink plates, and sour mash and knives

on the shelves, and ammo in drawers, and a still with thumpers, cones,

worms, arms, coils, gauges, pipes, caps, plugs--the whole shebang--

plus crates of Royal Crown Cola and Big Red and Chek Soda. 

We got bread from the Chug-a-Lug, rummaged through patterns 

at Patsy Preel’s Fabrics, and picked up the newspaper in the lobby

of the Dew Drop Inn around where Pope Lick Road fell into Monkey’s Uncle Creek. 

You know the rest--modernity encroaches on every molecule in the world. 

What’s left there now, I see a lot about that online, the drugs and decline

and closing mines, but I believe I would still recognize its sweet, messy heart.