Born in Weeksbury, Kentucky, Edwina Pendarvis lives in Huntington, West Virginia. Her poems and essays appear in Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, Indiana Review, Now & Then, Wind Magazine, and other journals in the region. Like the Mountains of China, her most recent poetry collection, was published by Blair Mountain Press.
Landing at La Guardia
(a prelude, September 2000)
Spiraling down the dusky air
in a balletic descent
on beauty,
we saw the city below us, its lights
shaken from heaven—
a windfall of stars
on a wide, black plain.As the plane stooped closer,
leaden towers—foreboding midnight moons,
eclipsed by shadow—
loomed up, out of the city.These blind cathedrals thrummed hymns.
The century’s fires—set against the cold—
blaze in unison
around sepulchral moons
drawing the dark tide.
≈
Chase at Daybreak
As the hounds’ cry blares
like northern lights in the sky at dawn,
the hunters on horseback leap
salamander streams
and leave the kitchen behind
with its noncommittal icebox.
They desert the guilty grill
and a patient shovel leaning
against the house;
forget children and friends
decorating the lawn like ornaments
bought at a greenhouse.
Far ahead in the distance, a ruby gleam
flashes through the hedge;
a choir of locust-song rises all around.
Out of earth’s uterine globe,
something is pulled, a red yolk swells
with the wild barking of the hounds.
≈
Haunting
Like the screeching of an owl—
now here, there now;
like the white of fallen snow—
winds stop, winds blow;
as a gate to empty fields
never gives, never yields,
so the spirit takes its form
from each thing that calls it home.
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