• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE
Big Talk
When mountains boomed and boomed again
returning echoes all along
the chain, the Indians said the peaks
were talking to each other in
the idiom that mountains use
across the mighty distances,
with giant syllables and rests.
White hunters feared it might be guns
or even cannon natives had
somehow acquired to warn them from
the better hunting grounds and streams,
the blasts as loud as thunder on
the clearest days and coldest nights.
Geologists would later hold
the groans and barks inside the ridge
were shelves of massive, restless rock
that slipped or dropped far down within
the mountain’s guts, a fracture or
a crashing at some fault as part
of the tectonic conversation
among the continents as old
as planet earth or starry birth,
the gossip of creation’s work.
Big Bone Lick
At Big Bone Lick the first explorers
found skeletons of elephants they said,
found ribs of woolly mammoths,
tusks of mastodons and ribs of sloths
that lurched across Kentucky once
near twenty feet from snout to tail.
They dug out teeth the size of bricks
and skulls of giant bison, beavers.
In salty mud licked bare by elk
and deer and buffalo and bears
for ten millennia, the bones
seemed wreckage from a mighty dream,
a graveyard from a golden age,
or killing ground of titans. Here
they saw the ruins of a world
survived by its diminutives,
where Eden once gave way and shrank
to just a regular promised land
to fit our deadly, human scale.
Jaguar
Where Lawson, Bartram, others wrote
they saw a “tiger” in the hills
and woods of Carolina I
assumed they meant a panther or
a bobcat, never guessed there were
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE
Big Talk
When mountains boomed and boomed again
returning echoes all along
the chain, the Indians said the peaks
were talking to each other in
the idiom that mountains use
across the mighty distances,
with giant syllables and rests.
White hunters feared it might be guns
or even cannon natives had
somehow acquired to warn them from
the better hunting grounds and streams,
the blasts as loud as thunder on
the clearest days and coldest nights.
Geologists would later hold
the groans and barks inside the ridge
were shelves of massive, restless rock
that slipped or dropped far down within
the mountain’s guts, a fracture or
a crashing at some fault as part
of the tectonic conversation
among the continents as old
as planet earth or starry birth,
the gossip of creation’s work.
Big Bone Lick
At Big Bone Lick the first explorers
found skeletons of elephants they said,
found ribs of woolly mammoths,
tusks of mastodons and ribs of sloths
that lurched across Kentucky once
near twenty feet from snout to tail.
They dug out teeth the size of bricks
and skulls of giant bison, beavers.
In salty mud licked bare by elk
and deer and buffalo and bears
for ten millennia, the bones
seemed wreckage from a mighty dream,
a graveyard from a golden age,
or killing ground of titans. Here
they saw the ruins of a world
survived by its diminutives,
where Eden once gave way and shrank
to just a regular promised land
to fit our deadly, human scale.
Jaguar
Where Lawson, Bartram, others wrote
they saw a “tiger” in the hills
and woods of Carolina I
assumed they meant a panther or
a bobcat, never guessed there were
