Hard Climb Road

by Deborah Pope

for my grandmother

         I

Driving home to her funeral in September,
we head down the Piedmont,
taking the freeways that run by fields
and outlet malls, morning stretching away
under the benign and vacant blue skies
Carolina is known for.
A Greensboro station plays oldies in the car,
and loss only lasts till the last dance.
Outside Mt. Airy, we pick up two lanes
through Cana, Galax, and Fancy Gap,
past the hillbilly markets and stands,
molasses, apples, and Dixie kitsch,
trailing pony-tailed girls in pickups.
The day is cool and clear, a weekend
to dream, or retrieve, of family rides
in fall, a peaceful film unfolding
of southeastern hills and farms,
silos and satellite dishes,
sheep still as stones in the fields.
In Virginia, the new road’s half done,
shale shingling up where the cut is rawest.
My sons sing out at every crane,
thrill through blasting zones.
We fly down the far side of vistas
that make majesty almost tangible,
forests like a murky pool we sink in,
greening as we surface.

         II

We enter the earth at Big Walker Tunnel,
come out to the random Calvary crosses
driven in by guerrilla believers
on the steep slopes of West Virginia.
Near Bluefield, the “Gospel Light Trio”
goes by in a bus. Now the pines rise
straight from the interstate,
the turnpike traversing rock risers
high over towns named Paint Creek,
Cabin Creek, Skitter, and Laurel.
Hollow into hollow, valleys interlock
their fingers, our road winding
like a rosary between them.
By late afternoon, we are skirting Charleston.
The children pester and fight,
sleep and stare, their hours dragging.
They know nothing of the passage
that has called us back.
So young, they forget even this
as it happens, will hardly remember
a figure so spectral and frail.
I remember holding old prints of her
in furs and leghorn hat, laughter
rare for photographs of those days,
the backdrops a lawn lunch
or running board, beaux with bears
and pocket swags. She said to me once,
I do not feel old, it is only
something about my face.
In the dusk beyond the window,
I imagine her last meal of chocolate
and broth spooned in by my father,
her head like a boiled egg under his hand.

         III

Outside St. Albans, we take 35 North.
The crossroads of Winfield,
Fenton, Frazier’s Bottom,
drowse on the Ohio floodplain.
This is a sky that knows limits,
even the animals are few enough to point at,
Angus like burned stumps in the fields.
Voting signs fly by, lifted in the wind
that stirs the weeds in unhitched harrows,
petunias in painted tires.
At Morgan’s Landing, in their giant alembics,
the nukes bubble and brew.
There is an air as if the people had gone,
left work waiting in the yard,
the tobacco half-strung, gone in
from the baskets and clotheslines,
where shirts flap brainlessly,
like hands endlessly waving goodbye.

         IV

When we come to the river at Gallipolis,
we are on the last leg home.
We have crossed four states
to reach the dark, the sky
like an afterglow of great conflagration.
Clouds move in a long, slow barge.
In the quiet universe of the car
the children sleep.
Lights of the cars ahead burn like coals.
All seems suspended in time.
The names of country roads fall away
in our headlights — Grace’s Run,
Tranquility Pike, Hard Climb Road —
they toll the stations as we pass.
We are almost home.
Along the ridge the twilight trees
move like a procession
of women in black mantillas
bearing the moon aloft,
the delicate tracery of
their silhouettes vanishing.
At last, it rises free,
a piece of ivory,
a bright bone,
a slip of a thing,
washed smooth and clean
in the long pull of the dark.


DEBORAH POPE has published four collections of poetry, most recently Take Nothing (2020) from the University of Pittsburgh Press, which is also re-issuing her first collection, Fanatic Heart, in their Classic Contemporary Series. Her poems have been in many journals, including Georgia Review, Triquarterly, Southern Review, Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Birmingham Review, and Poetry East. In 2019 she received the Robinson Jeffers Award.

 

Poem from Fanatic Heart (Louisiana State University Press, 1992).