On The Keys

Jon Grier's piece Pisgah Songs captures the beauty of the NC National forests. The poets kindly allowed their poems to be posted below. Looking Glass (Keller Cushing Freeman) I send you winter love: ice crystals glittering like mica in the stiff red clay; the caught breath of a silent creek, turned glass by last night's cold; the oldest stars shivering light from distances re-marked in years; lines a severe wind drew and then erased, tracks a-cross the landscape of a face, a bare December heart, wreathed with all the lost green seasons it remembers. Black Mountain (Marian Willard Blackwell) In the eggshell light of winter dusk awash behind a tracery of limbs, I am suffused with apprehension: everything I love in this deep world is fragile. Long after our footprints (Jan Bailey) folded into leaf and the sprig of holly you snapped and stuck in the lapel of your loose coat curried and browned; and long after we stopped speaking of the vexed hawk which shrieked as we dawdled on the parkway