The old short bed Chevy blocks the way to the weedy gravel in front of the old repair shop. Tires are stacked against the old metal building, rims swimming with mosquito babies. A beat-up side door is blocked open and from inside comes the sound of metal on metal and occasional swearing. The big elms sway in a breeze somewhere between spring and summer. The sound of a Sawyer Brown song lilts from a cassette deck covered in cobwebs. Across America, a thousand-upon-a-thousand s

Old and worn highway winds next to the creek, a creek now obscured by green leaves and the falling dark. Frogs peep. The old town’s yellow street lamps cast globes of light in the creekside forest, illuminating clouds of flimsy Mayflies. The darkness is close, the water down below running over limestone. Springtime in the Ozarks is here. Heavy traffic whines on the big six lanes. Not long ago, the anachronists of the Ozarks would have stumbled over the idea of big road and

I’m flipping through the magazine, looking at pictures of a traveling circus, documented as it wound its way through the Upper American South sometime in the late 1960s. The photos are in color and a little grainy. The performers magnificent, but a bit worn. The photojournalist had been embedded, traveling with the troupe as they left their warm Florida winter quarters and made another arduous journey north in the spring, battling rain and storms and winding, rocky, mountaino

“Levitt’s swinging right caught him by the cheek-bone and he staggered, driven back by the force of the larger man’s onslaught.” — Louis L’Amour, “Where the Long Grass Blows” L’Amour was “America’s Favorite Storyteller.” I know that because those words are printed on the cover of all his books. This book is small, as pulp Westerns should be, and thus easy to hold, published first in 1976, then 1988 and again in 1997. The dramatic Western cover art is from 1988, about the sa

The early rains came down again, like they always do this time of year. The grass greens. The daffodil blooms, reminder that no matter the crazy outrage of the day, there is solace in new life, again and again. It seems the world begins anew each year with water running over stone. I am playing again in the water at the little culvert under the driveway. The little pool that formed was shaded by watchful black locust trees and friendly honeysuckle and yet still the pool was

I was assigned the poem by my arts instructor, a harebrained faculty member in tweed who kept changing the rules every time she lost sight of the curriculum.

I remember the summer’s light dappled through the urban tree canopy of maple and birch and ginkgo, the summer sky a patchy blue over St. Louis, the old doors blue, red, green and white, each stoop, each old 19th century doorway, leading to another home, another series of lives and pasts and memories and futures. A mockingbird perched high up, surveying. A rabbit bounded into an overgrown lot where others’ memories once stood, now a jungle of castor bean plants and invasive Ch

Far down the road, the Ozark Mountains rise in hills and hollers deep. But here along the river the rocks are harder to see, rare highway rock cuts made back in the old days when highway roads were new and government work crews recently enlisted.

The full wolf moon rises slowly in the early evening’s eastern sky. Last light of day and the Ozarks are shades of rust and umber, red and lemon yellow, the sky that pale creamy blue of early winter. Too daylight yet for stars. Only the moon can be seen, also pale and creamy and massive, as it tugs on the tides and calls to the coyotes in the fields out beyond the high school. In the rise of the full moon, there is yet a sense of rotation, of our movement in the celestial sea

“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by…” And I remember a long ago and cold December evening, standing, ready for bed, barefoot, wearing one of my dad’s worn out white t-shirts as a makeshift nightgown, while a PBS personality of sorts — I’ve no idea who — began reading “Sea Fever” by John Masefield. The guy looked very appropriately poetic standing with the sea behind, while wearing a thick

The limestone cliffs on Highway 165 near Table Rock Mountain tower above the road and above the lake which flows, ribbon-like, far below. Brief afternoon sun highlights the bluff, etching ancient karst rock in warm relief. Cathedral walls in nature are easy enough to overlook on a busy schedule — just another rock cliff, just another bunch of trees, just the lake below. Even here, in the miracle of space and air and stone and life, the mind reduces the experience to the munda

A lemon sky gathers, clouds a distant tangerine smudge where the sun is setting on the far western horizon, somewhere over Oklahoma it seems, and the ribbon road is again endless, east versus west, time over and again. The forest ridges tumble away on all sides, faceless, nameless to the 80-mph-travelers on I-44, forest ridges that were not long ago crimson and rust-red, before then, dusky green and thick in the summer heat, now, hazel and gray, umber and dead. These passin

Oaks are known for strength, but it takes more than just strength to weather the storms of this old world.

The orange streetlamps lit a covey of maple trees, trees whose leaves were making weird shivery noises in the early nighttime darkness. The sound was almost that of the ocean surf in the new dark of yet another Saturday, another week, another deep fall night, another onrushing winter, another year cold and soon dead. I stood on the high cement parking deck, modern American convention hotel juxtaposed with another old neighborhood. The orange light cast weird shadows over tras

I climb into my truck at nightfall, trusty Basset joining on the console. Key in ignition, watchful reverse into the alley. Bright crescent moon in the Southwest peeks through poplar branches. Truck tires on gravel, then edge-of-town asphalt. Yellow street lamps light the way, one block, two blocks... At the edge of light, a figure darts across the road. I blink. Human form, running motion. Except — the figure was gray, ragged portions of the body missing. And it is sprinting

Historically, we cannot argue with the stout Christian faith of our Scots-Irish forebears who settled these hills, nor question their reasons for leaving the Old Country.