PLUMMER’S HOLLOW ELEGY

When her mind went they took her away from the house in the hollow where she’d lived forty years in combat readiness with her dog & her shotgun, a color TV & her dead brother’s artificial legs standing guard at the top of the stairs.

Her ancestors’ land had been sold out from under her & clear-cut by the absentee owner who couldn’t be bothered with a mother’s deathbed commandment half a century old: Don’t let anyone lumber the mountain again. She’ll never survive a third cutting & neither will you.