The poem's first line is almost casual: "When her mind went they took her away." The phrasing sounds like neighbourhood gossip, and the vague "they" never gets a face. Yet the poem is an elegy, and what it mourns is double. One loss is a woman's sanity and independence. The other is a mountain stripped of its trees. The central idea is that the two cannot be separated. The poem moves from a woman's collapse to a mother's prophecy, and the prophecy collapses the difference between a person and the ground she stands on.
The first stanza draws her in a few sharp strokes. She has lived "forty years in combat readiness," a military phrase that turns a house in a hollow into a fortress under siege. Her defences are an odd, touching list: "her dog & her shotgun, a color TV / & her dead brother's artificial legs." The shotgun and the dog are what we expect. The television suggests ordinary comfort. Then come the prosthetic legs, "standing / guard at the top of the stairs." The line break helps here. "Standing" hangs at the end of one line, and the legs seem to hold their pose a moment before "guard" arrives. They are a strange sentry: the shape of a body with no body left, a dead man's absence posted at the stairs. They suggest a woman who keeps what remains of her family close and treats even its leftovers as protection. The poem never calls her mad until it says her mind went, and by then we have already seen the logic of her vigilance.
The second stanza explains what she was guarding against. "Her ancestors' land had been sold out from under her" turns a legal sale into something physical, as if a floor were pulled away. The buyer is an "absentee owner," and that word is the opposite of everything the woman is. She stayed for forty years, while he could not even be "bothered" with a promise made to a dying woman. The poem's verbs are blunt. The land was "clear-cut," and the mother's request is called a "commandment," a word with biblical weight. It is also "half a century old," so the poem sets one person's long loyalty against another's careless transaction.
The ending gives the dead mother the last word: "Don't let anyone lumber the mountain again." Using "lumber" as a verb is a good choice, because it sounds like the heavy, grinding work it names. Then the pronouns slip. "She'll never survive a third cutting / & neither will you." The "she" is the mountain, personified as a living body. The "you" is the daughter. In one sentence the mountain and the child are bound together, and the poem implies that the warning has come true. The clear-cut land and the woman taken away are the same event seen from two sides. Both have been cut down.
The sound of the poem supports this. Hard c and k sounds recur in the key words: "combat," "color," "clear-cut," "commandment," "cutting." The blunt consonants never settle into a pattern, but they make the language feel clipped and a little violent, and "clear-cut" and "cutting" quietly echo each other across the second stanza. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are long, plain and conversational, and the ampersands keep them casual and quick, like speech. That informality keeps the poem from sounding like a lament, and the lack of ornament makes the loss feel factual. Most elegies end with some consolation, but this one ends on a threat spoken years ago and fulfilled.
The poem is significant because it gives real weight to a person who would usually be dismissed as an eccentric with a shotgun. In under a dozen lines it shows how a life can be defended with dogs, guns and prosthetic legs, and how none of that helps against a signature on a deed. It also asks the reader to take her seriously. She is a guardian of a place, and her breakdown is part of that place's destruction.