Graves, J: Basin Ghosts

Basin Ghosts is a chapbook of original poems by Jesse Graves, author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine. Many poems in Basin Ghosts address places and themes that resonated in Graves's first collection, which won both the Weatherford Award and the Appalachian Writers' Association Book of the Year Award in Poetry. The poems in Basin Ghosts examine life in the rural South, changes that have occurred over generations in communities there, and the ways in which the past lives on through memory and attachment to the land.

Grace Notes

Leora never walked the quarter-mile of red dust

to her bench at Big Sinks schoolhouse

without carrying the hand-sewn satchel

she used for an accordion case.

The notes came to her out of some darkness,

a cavity just inside her ear

where the curve of a sound pushed through

her fingers and into the buttons of that strange machine.

Where did the accordion come from?

The imprint read Vienna Austria 1904

and how it arrived to her in Capps Creek,

Tennessee, the middle of the middle of nowhere

will pass like the mystery of cloudburst,

some graceful symmetry beyond this world

and beyond the next.