ALL SHORT-A APPALACHIA

You want to ratchet this world's fury down?
Then learn to say it right. Not Appa-lay-
cha, Appa-latch-a.
                                     I mean you,
you NPR announcers earnestly
enunciating all the accent marks
in Spanish or Sanskrit, you editors
who grant the standard and nonstandard tags
in dictionaries.
                               No, you didn't trash
our water, gash and snatch the mountaintops,
eradicate the chestnut trees, or plan
the factory stacks personally. You
just trample out our vowels.
                                                        Hear the whole
diaspora slam down their beer cans, stab
their students' final drafts, and smash the half-
carved radishes before they've had a chance
to bloom as radish roses?
                                                 We do that
as often as the quack newscasters drag
their "Appa-lay-cha" out.
                                                  It's not like quaint
or paid.
                 It's short a: acid, ash, scab, smack,
catastrophe, Cassandra, slag, last, wrath.

__

LIVING WITH THE BUREAU OF PUBLIC DEBT

Parkersburg, WV

"Look, here is water!" Acts 8:36

Not far down the river from Wheeling,
big-name astrologers
got started, and left. The local
template of leaving's hers:

a crowned and sashed Patsy Ramsey,
mother of JonBenét,
who weeps, queened and sprung, on the diner's
wall of fame. We wait, pay,

drive home by the dark Ohio,
river in negative,
marked mainly by an absence,
though this is where we live.

We'll never be Miss West Virginia,
raptured in Final Net.
We came here like the Federal
Bureau of Public Debt

which left DC with its river
reflecting the cherry blooms,
arched marble, sleek baby-joggers.
Over this river looms

the fire on top of the smokestacks
leaching Lord Christ knows what
all over the floodplain's stripclubs,
eating each rusty strut

that holds up the bridge, the highway—
so we all oxidate.
Behind us, the marble's melting.
Under us, pavement ate

the Mound Builders' ziggurats, meant,
like Public Debt, to link
the people with what they were missing.
Always, on the brink

of this river, the oil has pooled. It
blurred Aaron Burr when his
face fell on it. Now it coats
carport roofs, mattresses.

And as for the missing people—
we come here two by two
to find them. We're on commission.
Any river will do

for holy, however poisoned,
if breath moves on it. Choir
of broken things, keep on singing
"Look, here is water and fire."

____

on "All Short-A Appalachia":
See Tony Harrison's School of Eloquence or Selected Poems

on "Living with the Bureau of Public Debt":
Parkersburg: Aaron Burr slept on an island here while trying to start his empire in the Southwest. It's James Wright turf, but I was under the influence of John Constable's Southwark Mysteries.