Scatter the Ashes
Senior Creative Writing Project
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For a Degree Bachelor of Arts with
A Major in Creative Writing at
The University of North Carolina at Asheville
Spring 2006

By Ashlee Nicole VanMeter

Scatter the Ashes
Poems by Ashlee Nicole VanMeter
Ashlee Nicole VanMeter 825 Chandler Creek Road
Mars Hill, N.C 28754 828-689-4249
shamanscure@aol.com

Scatter the Ashes

Contents
A Psalm for Aids.
Circles of Stones	2
Adam, Sunday Morning	4
Ode to the Injured Rooster	5
Coal Miners Typically Don't Carry Ink Pens... .6
Hellen	8
After Hay Gathering	10
Tongue in Teeth	11
Absence Speaks Louder than Words	12
Haunting the Harvest	13
What was it that Gave Us Away	14
Holy	16
Atonement	17
Revival of Nationalism	18
He Looks Just Like Her Father	19
Driving Out the Copperheads	21
Charmed..	...24

a psalm for aids
The angles now, they are more defined than ever, they are carving away his cheeks. His skin, once the shade of red clay, has faded into ashes-just a dusty sheet spread out over bones. Although always thin, he's caving in and still refuses anti-retrovirals.
He cannot love his own blood, but will not fight it, either. He says sometimes he looks at his body and sees a tree standing even after it's died, after it's rotted inside, waiting for wind or fire. He's still alive, he grows yellow tomatoes and roses, the kind that feel like velvet. He writes letters home but will not visit. There are those who've told him he has asked for this, that somehow he deserves it. "Imagine" he says, "some look at me and they see justice."

VanMeter 1

circles of stones
Ruby refused to move when the earth shook underneath her feet.
The mountain must
have shuddered, cast
some stones down, sent them
rolling
towards the creek, dirt cascading with the velocity of waves.
The whole landscape was in motion and then all was still again.
The mountain had shifted its weight claimed a little more of her
backyard. There are
still scars on its
breast from this, just north of
the pine grove
where light never reaches ground, on out past the ancient unmarked graves.
Before the pasture fence stitches the ridge closed tight against wilderness

VanMeter 2

are crevices etched deep, like earth slid out from underneath the oak tree,
scattered the dirt packed around its roots, left them stiff and sprawled mid air
like shocked fingers reaching, seizing vacant space where rock had cradled ground.
Ruby refused to to move until the shudder of death claimed her.
Now, all that's left to be unearthed of hers are circles of stones
buried beneath overgrown grass, concealed by trees, briars. Creekside,
mountainside,
every side of
this house, these peculiar
arrangements,
jagged stone, quartz stone, smooth creekstone, intentional, meditative, circles.
It's Ruby and her strange circles, circles and circles of stones.

VanMeter 3

Adam, Sunday Morning
Wilted on the couch, body curled around a coffee cup breathing steam, bringing warmth to the hollow core
orbiting between chest and stomach. Barely blue, rooms stir before sun's settled in. Descending stairs, Adam
sneaks a smirk my way and I decline its aim. Adam yawns with arms outstretched and turns his interest elsewhere.
He goes on to load splintered logs into the wood stove, blows onto stubborn coals, returns dusting ashes
from his eyebrows. My cheeks still burn from the stubble of his face. "The coffee's weak," I say, "too weak, you don't know
the way I like it.. .dark." "Darlin"' he replies with an accent steeped in Suwannee River swamp water, "You-
you don't know enough to know what you like just yet." With that, Adam returns to stirring ashes, urging
a reluctant flame.

VanMeter 4

Ode to the injured rooster
There is a primitive pecking order, battling egos in barnyards. Arrogance can strut about on four gnarled claws and a spur, pride sways like palm fronds in the tail feathers of a rooster.
He is a charmer, seducing the hen with cocked wing, ruffled neck, and an oscillating lopsided dance. He does not go unehallenged-another rooster cuts in, another dance begins.
With a sudden dart of beak, the intruder plucks the charmer's pride, that single hind feather iridescent green, hoisted like a flag above his head.
His diminutive kingdom invaded, assailed, defamed. He sulks away dragging his wilted feather through soggy hay and snow.
Oh, injured warrior you will conquer again, you will have your hen. There are plenty of other chicks in the barnyard.

VanMeter 5

"coal miners typically don't carry ink pens "
"It wasn't bad" inscribed on the back of an insurance form. "I just went to sleep" tucked into a lunch box. "Tell all I'll see them on the other side", signed Junior, chronicling his own slow decline. Carbon monoxide widened the loops of letters, in the coal dust dark he could not see to circle back, join lines, close an open "o"
"A tragedy- not because hope was abandoned, but because it was embraced"
Church bells rang, proclaimed a miracle. Baptist Church doors burst open, joy scattered the dust of silent streets. The families' answered prayers were later explained as a minor miscommunication-static, a bad connection-All of them survived? Everyone had died? Perhaps there's one still left alive? A few lost their faith right there and left, the rest couldn't bear to be alone.

VanMeter 6

"Quietly, efficiently, the rituals of comfort and solace were set in motion "
All the Red Cross could offer were cots and aspirin, some stayed to pray and accepted those, others just walked home. A bowl of potato salad marked the moment between miracle and mourning, followed by baked ham, a pound cake, a grown woman screaming into the deaf belly of a teddy bear.

VanMeter 7

Hellen
I'll holler at Helen
stand on that lurid mountain,
call her name three times, "come forth."
Maybe she'll grace us with a vision, her apparition. This local legend is too
enticing to be left
unexplored. A woman
hung herself from a footbridge
above the road, her ghost
a curiosity
that can't be left alone.
Lingering beneath the bridge,
we all are wondering
what white dress will come waltzing
up the road, what spirit
will spread her sad lost shadow
across our path tonight?
We eye the dangling vines wanting to see some specter swinging to satiate
a morbid thirst, and I myself can say the taste of blood was rising in my mouth.
It was not long until
I looked up to see a star
shoot straight out of the galaxy,
drop without an arch or flaming tail to follow. It fell from the horizon

VanMeter 8

without its due supernoval glory, just plunged right out of the heavens,
and I thought of Helen,
how unremarkable
her leap must have been,
how dirt reserves the final dignity, how quick it is that gravity drags us down to earth.
That night those distant city lights flickered between the trees like fireflies in July.
I imagined those woods deeper than they were, to be a wide river reflecting
starlight, it was clear that night
and those celestial bodies
that would have drowned in city
lights were undaunted, unobscured, were infinite luminous points in a
nocturnal sky, the moon a waning crescent eclipsing from our sight.

VanMeter 9

After Hay Gathering
Fever ascends
from the dry earth of this acre.
Pasture gasping, field'share fibers
thirst for a feel
of midnight's fallen
fog. Absorbing all, even the shock of night-
soaked-grass on skin is good, the press of sunburned flesh to dirt- nourishing.
We count the bales
by moonlight- enough to keep the horses fed
all winter. The generous
earth of August will get us through
the winter.

VanMeter 10

Tongue in Teeth
Know that my silence does
not equate consent.
Bite your tongue and say that five times fast, asshole-find out what it means.

VanMeter 11

absence speaks louder than words
Since you could not hear my voice, you say,
over the music-I vanished. I let
my absence shout what you refused
to hear. Do not say I didn't tell you.
I shouted with my absence, left
an echo wailing in the empty space
long after words had failed us.

VanMeter 12

Haunting the Harvest
Tobacco is bowed, baking in rows across arrowhead fields and strangely resembling tee-pees. The tan hides of native tents rise, resurrected out of dirt. The scene signals September is descending upon us and with it, soft stepping ghosts haunt the harvest. A forgotten people have now been spotted crossing the creek, and coyotes heard howling on hillsides while the tasseled, chest high corn stalks whisper a dry voiced rustle and hush.

VanMeter 13

what was it that gave us away?
We escaped to trace constellations but found a vacant sky, so obscured by clouds even the moon was reduced to a ring of blue smoke orbiting earth.
As if that fog
might hide us from the ever-present eye
who would consume us, see through skin and flesh,
find some fertile need growing like a seed
in an apple core,
we pressed into
the sharp edged woods, still unaware of our bare feet. As the brittle briars bent to bear us in, they etched their warning in our skin-pervasive marks
map our uncertain
passage in and out of Eden, and then the consequent unveiling. That infamous Apple, the first taste, the fall, it all unfolded in
the wet wood's vapors that rose to bear the old bones of oak, dismantled branches, sturdy spine, the enduring dignity of pines,
never laying down
their decorum. Ripe and unraveled from first taste we could not cover or collect ourselves, we felt
with a shy
and undeniable touch, a slow persistent pressing hand, the lavish grass insatiable for the honeysuckle

VanMeter 14

hysteria of summer night to fall into the aching earth of that acre. Leaf tangled hair, blistered soles of feet, dirt embedded heel, we
wore that landscape
well into morning. With the fruit still fresh in our mouths, we felt the familiar cool gaze descend upon us,
enveloping as fog-then the creaking gate into the pasture, the rusted lock that would not latch, disheveled shock, indignant rage-
what was it that gave us away?

VanMeter 15

Mourning
As I leave, the urgency
of my departure is suspended
in particles that cloud above
the dirt road to my home.
Dusty pines cling to ashes
scattered in my hurry,
I cannot look back without
choking in the very air I breathe.
Prayer
Barefoot, for weeks I have tried to get a foothold on this place, folding fingers into foreign soil, sowing seeds with a growing need to make this place my home. Finally, I find comfort in the dirt that has gathered beneath my fingernails.
Grace
I seek communion with the sunflowers
as they face the setting sphere-
the raw honey of its essence
that sweetens the apples of autumn
and draws the garden from the ground.
Standing strait-spined among them
in the evening hours of late summer,
I envy the grace in which they face
the turning of the seasons.
Holy
The old man with the crooked stick kneels with his back bent to the sun, sifting the soil of his field in search of the ancient- arrowheads. When he finds one he turns it between his fingers, letting it rest for a moment in his palm before dropping the artifact into a plastic grocery bag, then delivering it with quiet pride into my eager hands.

VanMeter 16

Atonement
I was the one up at dawn searching shadows in the rain, stepping softly, light as the dew I knew the night before-1 was there for the fall.
I was the one pacing circles in the moonlight, wet from wandering and awake-always awake. I was the one in need of atonement.

VanMeter 17

December 2001: Revival of Nationalism
Shop-n-Save sign reads- God Bless America Cheap Gas Cartons starting at $11.99.
Two more miles into city, The Hop black disc neon bleeds God Bless America. Now hiring smiling faces.
cheap God
gas now
hiring smiling faces-America.

VanMeter 18

He looks just like her father
Thirty-three, anticipating a second
puberty, she steps out onto the front porch and calls her dog in tones that move lower
down the throat, deepen, sink into some hard place in her chest where he is learning to
speak from. Every morning she must find his voice and hold it, conscious of how
he coughs, laughs, silent when he fears his pitch will give her away.
In his room, door closed, shades drawn, he stares
at her bare chest in the mirror. Red rivulets, swollen, streams of seething heat circle her waist.
Gauze bandage forms a grid against the blistered skin of her back like ravaged land, leveled,
scraped from shoulder blade to shoulder blade, raw, each square foot mapped and planned for construction.
She tucks one end of a binder under her left arm, pulls with the right, wraps around,
feels it compress her rib cage, breathes a deep breath before fastening the fanged clips.
He walks with heavy heal, shoulders squared, bent slightly forward, hands in pockets with just
the thumb exposed. Jaw tight, head down, posture
pulled upright by the binder shrinking her small
breasts into pecs, a hard chest underneath
his white t-shirt. He is learning to take
up space, make a place for himself.
Head tilted, she checks the thin hairs beneath
her chin, the eager beginnings of a beard, scattered, concealed to all but her by shadow.
For now, his stubble is stuck on with spiritgum, a bottle of thick liquid the color
of maple syrup. She dips a hard bristled paintbrush in, lifts it coated and sticky,
reeking of fingernail polish remover and bourbon. It tingles like windburn.

VanMeter 19

She clips inch long strips of hair, held against
the scissors edge they are ground down to
the consistency of sand. Stubble
impossible to grip, pick up, it sticks
in the swirling ridges of her callused thumb.
He taps out sideburns down her jaw line
one finger width at a time then angles
a squared edge brush, gives two short strokes beneath
the bottom lip and pats on a patch of stubble-just enough to pinch between his thumb and finger.
He evens the left sideburn level with
the right, scrapes off the excess with a dull
blade, the skin raises in response. With careful
pressure, cheek inches from mirror, he shapes
a clean edge. A reflection catches his eye-He looks just like her father.

VanMeter 20

driving out the copperheads
Adam, I've been thinking of how you burned down that woodshed,
all the oak, poplar, pine inside- a winter's worth of warmth
you exhausted in one night- how you heaped piles of dead leaves,
sawdust, bark, struck a match, stepped back and gave a glance my way.
I stared at the first flames, fire-lighted face, heat blazed my cheeks
like a rush of blood brings blush. Your glance, pressing as a hand
on startled flesh, confessed your reasons. Even if a moment's
honesty could extinguish our destruction, you'd rather have
these ravaged ashes than you and I exposed. The tin roof
raised up, wavered in a gust of wind, peeled back and bared black boards

VanMeter 21

before collapsing, as if that woodshed undressed, revealed it's flesh
then scattered every bone. Remember how you were surprised
to find snakes, how you traced the flattened path of copperheads
through grass back to the woodshed? Do you remember the babies-how they could thread their heads through crevices in warped wood planks
and you accused the walls of dripping venom, feared fall's leaves,
their hiding place. Adam, its no wonder snakes laid their eggs
in that woodshed. We met many nights in there once our lovers
went to bed. You walked through the shadowed pasture, I, afraid,
would wait behind the briars where your woods were thick-never caught.
We never thought of poison. Do you remember that October-

VanMeter 22

barefoot in the woodshed sawdust on our skin, leaves tangled
in my hair. There were no snakes, back then. Even we were forbidden.
You can keep on lighting fires to reduce us down to dust,
the smoke will rise and when it passes, Adam, your obsession
lies exposed in all these ashes.

VanMeter 23

Charmed
The creek coaxes stones into sleeping nude by its side. Bare skin can sense its breath pass over backs of rocks-washed of dirt, stripped of root, carved out, corners rounded smooth without force or fire, only a current quickened touch, the swell of rain water, only fluid meditation-a source ever replenished.
Who would not want to soak bare skinned in that prayer, omniscient as dirt, divine as the night chants of crickets?

VanMeter 24