BJZ Poems and Musings

I was born and lived until age 18 in Western New York, along the Pennsylvania border, where the ridges and foothills of the Allegheny Mountains run together like shoulders in a crowd. Our little hamlet was called Vandalia. The Nine Mile Creek wound down our valley to the Allegheny River, and the fields, hills, forests, bogs, along with the curiosities of my uncle’s and grandfather’s small farms were our playgrounds. Boys like my 3 brothers and I, raised in Vandalia, were destined to become ridge runners, and that was what we were called.

When school let out for the summer in late June our denim jeans became cut-off shorts, we were usually shirtless, and shoes were a sometime thing. We were outside from sun-up to sundown and often slept outside under an old canvas tent. We dammed the Nine Mile Creek to make swimming holes. We rode our bikes up Nine Mile Road to the headwaters of the creek to fish for brook trout.

Our boyhoods were a native exploration of the thousands of acres of fields, streams, river, and forests, with the freedom to become totally immersed in the natural world. A nine year old boy could follow his whims and just wander in the woods for a bit. This poem describes what he might find.

The Hole

In the hollow log just north of the fence line,
In my cut-offs, barefoot days,
With the wood wet and rot-minded, the soft slivers
Held together only by the migrant arms of mycelia,
There was a hole,

About the size of a robust porcupine,
Or a raccoon, perhaps a ‘possum.
I knew he, or they, or all three were in there,
And I was scared on top of my infatuation,
Having been bit once by a ‘coon,
And seeing porcupine needles embedded in Boots’ nose,
And touching the teeth of a drowned ‘possum in the creek.

The blue jays would scream,
The crows would cry in the pines;
Staring each morning at the hole,
With remnants of Wheaties at my mouth corners,
That alluring vacancy with its garland of moss.
Nestled cross-legged in the oak leaves, I felt
Their warm and beady eyes peering out at me.

But they never came out of the hole.
My first plan was a puff ball,
Provoked into a brown, dank cloud
And tossed in there,
But they never came out of the hole.

Next a stick, I thumped like the beating
Of a thousand woodpecker heads,
And baritone hums tumbled from the hole
And floated echoless off, down the fence line.
I drummed in every annoying way,
My eyes fixed fast to the hole.
They withstood, I guessed, paws to their ears.

One dawn the hole became too black.
The crow had cried nine times.
The blue jays were screaming me on.
With a limb as big as me I pummeled
The log – the third swing the soft wood gave,
And in gooey slats it fell apart,
The moss flying off like green rabbit tails.

Fury spent, I looked for them scurrying,
Or baring their sharp teeth or spines on my bare feet,
Or jumping on my face to claw at my eyes.
There was no ‘coon, no ‘possum, no porcupine –

There was no hole.

Brian J. Zink circa 1983 Copyright rules apply