Chuck deVarennes - Poem

In Gilmer County Georgia the women mourn by instinct.
They cry over deep memories of lovers who tore them
from their fathers in their dreams.  Dreams Dickey divined.
Dreams which rolled through his mind and beat a bible cadence
out through the lightning of his arm, screaming onto the pages.
The women mourn.  They know him only in their dreaming possibilities,
only in    fantasies   of get away  of walking those woods and the faded welts
from their fathers, maddened by misused Bibles, cut for the glory of God.
They walk to the quarter moon's grinning challenge.      He has died,
their interpreter, their liberator, who thrust them onto the motorcycle seat.
Who told of the May sap rising, their involuntary ecstasies, their scourge
and resurrection and freedom.  Now he's gone with them up the high trail,
through the straight brittle Georgia pines.  He joins them in the dreaming
ecstasy of clouds.  The always mystery of fogs.  Fox skins flash back
from the barn nails.  The whole farm moves toward his climbing spirit,
singer of scourged ecstatic girls, singer of blood in the bone, and sky fire.
He goes to join those swirling memories he transposed.
Some Gilmer County women may not read his verse,
but they feel his spirit in the trees,
in the skin tearing willow branches of Gilmer County, that spirit
which sang their souls, made them free and immortal.