Orion Magazine - January-February 2009

waste place. Neither stubble nor crumb. Till it seemed as if a busy city had been passing out of sight. So it has been. Will be.

Outside the caverns, safe in the half-empty parking lot, come back to yourself. Unlock your car and drive slowly down the mountain road, careful on the switchbacks. Turn on the radio. Pass the >rst barn: good bye tell your friends about rock city. Yes, that’s right; these barns are how you heard about the place to start with. see seven states. world’s 8th wonder. bring your camera. beautiful beyond belief.

THE LORD’S WILL SHALL BE DONE
NOT YOURS OR MINE

—roadside sign outside Chattanooga

The barns were new once. Bright boards wept sap. There was that one roofed with hand-rived shakes cut from the great felled oak. The old men said, You got to do it at the right time of the light of the moon lest the shingles curl. Shakes nailed down tight.

Clark Byers didn’t need stencils; understood the di=erent iterations of barn, varying shapes in the same family. Painted see rock city on the roof with a wide brush. That dry wood drank paint, didn’t it. Hot work, sweat running down his spine, paint spattering his forearms, pulling his hair as it dried. Carolina grasshoppers leaping from yellow straw to light on tall pokeweed. Pokeweed juice a dye the Cherokee used. Had used.

Made his own paint from linseed oil and lampblack. “There were no such things as rollers,” he said. “Used a 4-inch brush, never had to measure letters and always worked freehand. Once that paint got on, there was no getting it o=.” He carried paint, rope, chalk, brushes. Dying barns de?ate like lungs. Inside them it is dusty, with a di=erent kind of darkness, and in the rafters you might see wasps swarming, or old swallows’ nests. Termites chew the planking, piling gray dust on the ?oor of pounded red clay. to miss rock city would be a pity read the John Molyneux barn. That was from the 1930s. It’s torn down now.

Traditionally, it took forty days and forty nights to cure tobacco in the barns. In early spring, you weighted seeds with ash to sow; come midsummer, cut green leaves, working slowly down the line. Bundled stems together in hands and set a slow >re. The leaves cured to brown, supple as skin on a wrist. Smoke wriggled out through gaps in the walls. You’d see it wafting over the >elds, smell it on a still night, dusty and sweet, like grass in August but darker. Most people have forgotten all this by now, or never knew. One day won’t anyone remember. a

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Suppose You Were a Moray Eel

when ancient Romans kept glass aquariums
filled to bubbling with your brothers
and old Licinius Muraena himself loved
to throw slaves in the water, stripping men

to bits. You cannot help it—it’s in your blood.
Witches wear dresses made of your skin,
sleek and gleaming. Don’t you see how they preen
whenever they pass a mirror? In the Ozark mountains,

I met a man who swears cooked eels turn raw
if they are left uneaten and so everyone—
even children—eat them quickly. They don’t want
to feel the slip and bite under their bed sheets

later that night. You move me. You move me anguilliform
and backwards, zipping through the sea with only
a quick-stop for shrimp and other creepy crawlies.
Your acorn heart sees the future—does it hold

a Valentine, Be Mine! or a glassy, spectacular car crash?
I am mostly blind, like you, but let us wait here
in this coral cave and count the number of smelt
that swim by. Let them go, all of them.