“You can have my right arm, but you’ll never get my mountain.”
—Larry Gibson, on his stand against mountaintop removal coal mining
This is a point: a green island in a sea
of scar, a rise not unlike his potbelly
under the neon green t-shirt—
and what with the hilltop cemetery like a belly
full of bodies resting sweetly, we could fairly
call his attachment umbilical.
And after all—his overall
pockets and pores emptied of the earth—all that’s left
squirreled away
is his blood.
But back to the point
and how they’re making it for him,
finer and higher and deader-
on than he ever could, waiting
here with the squat rocks waiting
to be eroded
into the holler—
the sound of their machines, he thinks,
brainless as barking:
that ceaseless ghost dog of his
filling in the blank of night.
