The great-aunts shuffle through the rubble,
black pocketbooks held close, at the ready,
They took the dining room table. Laws . . .
They broke every window, Lord, have mercy . . .
They tore out the walnut shelves!
I am six, confused—Who are . . . They?
The outhouse is horrifying enough
for a child half-reared by these women,
Edwardian hold-outs, my grandmother
the one sister to marry, endure sex,
go to France with her med student husband,
who, after studying with Madam Curie,
zapped so many tumors in the New South
he was able to buy this mountain acre,
these rooms that must have once been not broken.
But “Pop” is dead now, gone on, they say,
his beloved place on its own slow slide,
his wife and her sisters helpless, appalled
(an increasingly favorite word),
from confronting the low-side of life.
They’d been raised in Knoxville those summer nights
James Agee preserved for all time.
Their world had been all manners, honor.
Reading headlines from unbought newspapers
was, I was taught, the same as stealing.
And now senseless meanness, their best family
rooms trashed, debauched by Rabun county folk,
models for the locals Dickey would draft
to police the wild river (down two hills)
from the likes of us, Atlanta people,
a family fresh out of sober men
(my father will sell all this for bar debts).
I am the last great hope, only too late,
little more than a dress-up doll for them.
The world is changing. My aunts soon will die
the way we all do when days first go strange
then beyond redemption. Closing time.
The century’s half spent, so much is too late.
Atoms have been split, radiation spilt
beyond all recall, loosed even here
into innocent June bugs and dust motes
caught in this haze over Warwoman Dell.
