I try not to forget those days at home,
Though I would not like to live them again,
Alone with the chores and a currycomb
I used to groom Gray among the chickens
That ran out in the barnyard and mule-lot,
For telling you these details, I’m afraid,
Only makes any point I sharpen rot
Before it’s ripe or, on arrival, dead.

Reveries under the shed’s overhang
Close in on truths unbeholden to me,
Scrunched against the wall, sun sweet as sea tang,
The dew, too, dripping from the tin a spree
I cannot sing except to say it’s so.
Childhood, the goose-pimples, moments of bliss
I sense from decades back, gains my long row
I keep on hoeing while I reminisce.

It all comes to not knowing who I am.
I can smell a good promise now, and then
I am back for sure where I started from,
This Century Farm on Paul’s Hill, the wren
Across the road, its song loud and clear, slaves
In their mounds of clay unmarked near Pap’s stone.
Let me say again he’s there among graves.
Is there an unknown definite in bones?

They could be dug up to show July’s name,
In her homemade casket, though we must go
To Johnston County’s courthouse for a claim,
That Bill of Sale that a certain “Negro”
Girl Pap sold for a few hundred dollars.
Enough.  Our history’s those documents.
I walk out by the garden of collards
My mother set out near the past’s results.

I was a hillbilly when it was cool.
Far inside the culture I worked to play,
Sing songs I heard on radio; at school
I was asked to sing some songs I no way
Cared about: “They Were Doing the Mambo.”
Recall the line:  “While I just stood around.”
That’s how my life has gone, a patio’s
Sure not cotton fields.  Am I too far gone?

I saw Elvis in 1954,
Memorial Auditorium in
Raleigh, tail-end of Ferlin Husky Show.
The seats clank right now in memoriam
For Presley and Husky:  Ferlin was star
After Hank Williams’s death.  I can draw
Elvis’s mouth to the mike; his guitar
Is wearing something like a baby’s throw.

I got a woman way over town
That’s good to me, oh yeah – and the seats
Clatter the audience in one big drown.
He had just started recording with Sun
And Sam Phillips.  RCA came shortly.
The rest is history:  Faron Young said
No one could rent or buy a hillbilly
In Nashville:  real country music was dead.

1956 I graduated
From Cleveland High School.  I don’t remember
Being serious:  skipped:  drank homebrew:  made
Me closer to my father, Paul S R
And the wallop from his homemade whiskey.
We would turn out his thirty-five foxhounds
And their music prompted me to listen
To something inner, my own self alone.

I’ve told this many times before:  he came
Into the company bedroom.  I was
Filling out a long form.  He called my name,
Two syllables he’d never said because,
I suppose, like most old-time southerners,
His talking sort of rolled out in a wad.
He flung himself down on the comforter:
I said, “Daddy, I’m going to college.”

“Stay here with me and we will hunt and fish
And this place, Paul’s Hill, will be yours someday.”
Then he left me alone, echo, to wish
And wonder how I might work out the pay.
My sister-in-law left me at a dorm,
Lewis, in the lower quad of campus.
My Martin guitar I retired at home.
I am still getting used to that status.

If a frog had wings it would fly and not
Bump its rear-end across the ground to hop
Always into the unknown like the snot
Off a mule’s nostrils or swampy runoff.
I’m saying childhood’s Everything, almost,
The be-all in my life, I can tell you.
If I tried, I could not stand in as post
In some museum, tough as real lightwood.

I was not a sheep or goat:  I had to
Face up to being alone, no money,
Except what I earned for daily meals, three,
Lenoir Dining Hall, morning shift.  Mama
Made cakes she sold at Curb Market, Smithfield,
To help me get us through.  That’s love divine.
Ask me how I got through?  I can’t conceal
The way things happen to bring on sunshine.

I thumbed home first year: a janitor’s job
At a radio-station in Smithfield,
WMPM:  World’s Most Progressive
Market:  I soon learned the art of wheeling
Around in my chair:  I worked the console.
I must have breathed acres of nicotine.
VU meter’s needle my radio
Voice the bright red right level cleanly peaked.

Somehow I thought of Red Rooster Rudy
Out in the yard on Paul’s Hill, my desire
For Frank Gallop waving my love for Trudy.
Bought a ’54 Ford Victoria.
It had bad shocks.  I want to tell all this.
Where could I go after the farm?  Law School.
Oh oh oh.  We failed each other, what bliss.
I turned that blessing to verse – overrule.

– Shelby Stephenson