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96 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2002
Jocassee is the Cherokee word for a valley in the South Carolina mountains. In the early 1970s, despite fervent opposition by the valley’s inhabitants, Duke Power Company built a dam to create Jocassee Reservoir. Both the living and the dead were evicted, for hundreds of graves were dug up and their contents reburied in cemeteries outside the valley. The reservoir reached full water capacity in 1974. In Cherokee Jocassee means “place of the lost.”
ANTIETAM
The feast huddle explodes when I approach.
A gray fox remains, whitening to bone.
The risen wait in the limbs above
for me to glance the marker, pass on.
And I imagine their ancestors
descending the day after battle,
settling as soft and easy as ashes,
a shuddering quilt of feather and talon.
Locals swore each anniversary
those death-embracers found the way back,
gathered by some avian memory
to turn September branches black
as they hunched in rows like a regiment –
clear-eyed, voiceless, and vigilant.
TREMOR
Weight of water was what caused
cups to shiver in cupboards,
cows to pause, Duke Power claimed,
but those who once lived there
thought otherwise, spoke of lives
so rooted in the valley
some part of their lives lingered:
breeze of sickle combing wheat,
stir of hearth-kettle, the tread
of mule across the broken ground,
long ago movements breaking
across time like a fault line.