Ohio Connections Literary Exhibit
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Falling Rock Area
By Deborah Fleming
“Nothing is trite
along a river.” —James Wright
For Steven H. Emerman
warns the yellow four-pointed sign.
Bare sandstone rises high above the shoulder
where they blew the hillside apart.
On the other side
the river swells with melted winter.
Folds of water,
gray like the axe-breaking ironwood,
twist
like muscle around bone, against barges, spillway walls—
current always arriving, always slipping away.
The first white men to come here
stepped
into a forest
where hills met the river
and trees walked down.
You say they’ve all gone,
the ones who hewed limbs?
Earth heaves with bones.
Houses fling themselves down the slope ahead
where the railroad bridge groans in the wind.
Inside the mill yard a pipe
juts like an old man’s elbow
and a coal car forever climbs and falls
along its single track.
Sisyphus
without a god to punish him.
White mist boils from woods
on the river’s far shore.
We see buoys bobbing in black water
and know our frailty.
Steady rain loosens slabs,
scrabble of shale
above the road.
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