Reading this time from the newest collection of "New Stories from the South". Editor Shannon Ravenel edits this 17th edition, as she has 12 previous - with sharp eye and ear toward mood and substance, poetry as prose.

The first story in the anthology, "Tennessee", by Romulus Linney is full of magical simplicity, wisdom and horror. This small selection is not the story, but a wonderful moment as Sassy and her husband sit at cliff's edge and contemplate Tennessee in the distance. . .

"Silent air, with that huge, gaping hole below. But quiet they were, too, above the world and close to it. Hear that cricket clear its throat? Feel big or little in the dusk, depends. Mountains change a body. So, yes, make footprints. Then say it later. There I was, once. Know hard mountains, like all must. Live here, and accept death before it comes.

"Don't see the black bat against a pale moon.Study no sign. Of good, or bad. Or both together, all at oncet, or now. Call life mountain gloom or mountain glory, and death will take care of itself. Live here like birds, from ravens to finches. Look here, look there, fly here fly there, into the brush, the maple tree, and finally the sky, to come no more. Our miseries no different from anybody else's, just higher up. Try hard, but not too hard; birds won't. Slide your feet, and leave your trace, and let the mind alone whilst you brood over the eternal husks of our cruel and hard but, God damn you, piss-elegant mountains. Think kindly of men and women who live on them for a little while before they get old and die. Z is for Zack. He climbed a tree. His good Lord to see. The tree was tall, he had a fall. And never seen his Lord at all. If you require no abundance, you can squander all opinion. And accept death before it comes."

"If you require no abundance, you can squander all opinion" - I wish I'd written that.
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