Place Names
That was the winter of Eminent Domain: a porch collapsing
from the weight of no footsteps, a gravestone vanishing
in underbrush. Twelve miles and half a century down
the chip-and-gravel road from our farm, a man said Joppa
meaning church, his store, the house, neighbors: Joppa
until nothing was left but wind in the cedars, a name
frozen to a map. Who is left to speak of what this was?
Here, beyond the boundaries of Park, words still
take root on outcrops, ponds, boundary oaks, and barns;
they drop like seeds from the birds that land on barbed wire,
one by one, until the fenceline is a treeline, a weave
and cross-hatch of twigs and thickened light and sound.
Tonight, the year’s first dust of snow started falling on the road
past Mansfield Bend, and as I drove, it fell on Summer Seat,
Paul Wheeler’s Barn, and Haunted Hill. It fell, no doubt,
on Woodsonville and darkly on the spine of Dismal Rock.
Author's Link
http://www.uark.edu/depts/english/mccombs.html