New Writing from Walker Valley
Still: The Journal is an online literary magazine spotlighting Appalachian writers and artists. The summer 2024 issue features a pair of poems by Jeremy Lloyd, co-director of the Tremont Writers Conference and Manager of Field Program and Collegiate Studies at Tremont Institute. We are sharing the poems with permission from the publishers at Still, with additional context and reflection from Jeremy below.
Cemetery Oak
(Quercus rubra)
Giant one, though the passage
of time has not been kind,
still you cling on.
Your lightning-struck trunk,
rotting on one side, bears
saw marks near your half-gone
crown where birds still alight
on what remains of your branches.
Like obedient pupils
gathered at their teacher’s feet,
the rows of headstones lying
in your shade seem all eyes and ears,
ready to take notes.
Or perhaps it’s the other way around
and the old learners nourishing your roots
are providing instruction themselves,
a lesson about time and how the longer
one spends aboveground
the closer to the earth one gets.
—
Nebo Mountain
What an odd thing it is to cast my gaze
day after day upon a place where
I will never in my lifetime step foot.
Across the river and highway,
the mountain rises out of nothing,
solitary, a disjunct wedge of uplift
packed with rock older than dirt.
Through my kitchen window, I watch
it green up every growing season,
though I long ago gave up notions
of climbing it, too sheer its face
and too near the highway. Kick a rock
and I’m likely to shatter
a motorist’s windshield below.
Besides, there are some places
one shouldn’t go—the knitting circle,
a teenager’s bedroom, the temple’s
inner chamber. Call it exclusion,
but it is instructive to know
how Moses must have felt
and wonder just what secrets
hide behind the green veil.
We wave to one another instead,
the mountain and I, and there’s
contentment in staying right here
to watch curtains of mist
slough by between us as
we exchange curious looks.
—
A brief reflection from Jeremy about the poems:
Who knows where a poem comes from? I certainly don’t, nor do I want to. The main thing is to stay open. Receive the spore and water it. Try to keep one’s inner soil fertile to begin with by limiting machine time and going on walks. Sit still and stare into space. That sort of thing.
The first poem (Cemetery Oak) germinated while I was sitting in a coffee shop looking out the window at a tree towering over headstones dating back to when Knoxville wasn’t much bigger than Townsend is now. But it could just as easily be a tree in the Walker Valley cemetery. The one difference being that the oak tree in question died several months ago. Sitting in that same coffee shop this winter, I was sad to see it gone.
Nebo Mountain resides near my home in Blount County and is named for the mountain from which Moses glimpsed the promised land before he died. In the poem, there is a reversal, where Nebo becomes a place I can’t reach. Incidentally, members of the Stinnett line of Will Walker’s large family settled on the northwest-facing side of the mountain when Walker Valley was sold to the park commission in the 1920s. I’ve written another poem about the mountain since writing the first one. Maybe there will be more.
—
Cover image by Phillip Burrow, 2023 Autumn Brilliance Photography Workshop participant
