CHICKAMAUGA

by Debra Allbery

These mouths, you wrote on the flyleaf,
are all saying the same thing.

Fogged glass of an April Sunday, spring’s advent
a green haze over Cedar Mountain.

Your book on the deck table, its Tennessee music
floating toward Pisgah.

Chickamauga’s cover is a Muybridge sequence,
advent and exit of a single word, language
as a shaped shadow in eleven frames.

The coin between our teeth, you said.

And: Whatever it was I had to say,
I’ve said two times and then a third.
Repetition our only means of crossing the river.

I’m thinking of your reply to Wang Wei.
I’m listening for the words I’ve refused.

All those lost verses, Charles, still folded
in the chill hymnal of the Blue Ridge.

Nobody left now but us,
you wrote, to remember it.

Debra Allbery is the author of Fimbul Winter, which won the Grub Street National Book Prize, and Walking Distance, which won the Starrett Prize. She joined the poetry faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in 1995 and served as its director from 2009-2023. She lives near Asheville, NC.