Irene McKinney

I just learned from a friend that Irene McKinney died this week. She was a POET and an inspiration. Irene was the first writer I read who was from West Virginia and who wrote about our home country. Here are two of her poems.

Visiting My Gravesite:

Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia

Maybe because I was married and felt secure and dead

at once, I listened to my father's urgings about "the future"

and bought this double plot on the hillside with a view

of the bare white church, the old elms, and the creek below.

I plan now to use both plots, luxuriantly spreading out

in the middle of a big double bed. ---But no,

finally, my burial has nothing to do with marriage, this lying here

in these same bones will be as real as anything I can imagine

for who I'll be then, as real as anything undergone, going back

and forth to "the world" out there, and here to this one spot

on earth I really know. Once I came in fast and low

in a little plane and when I looked down at the church,

the trees I've felt with my hands, the neighbors' houses

and the family farm, and I saw how tiny what I loved or knew was,

it was like my children going on with their plans and griefs

at a distance and nothing I could do about it. But I wanted

to reach down and pat it, while letting it know

I wouldn't interfere for the world, the world being

everything this isn't, this unknown buried in the known.

--from Six O'Clock Mine Report (Pitt Poetry Series, 1989)

Stained

I'm stained with the iron-red water from the mines

and I'm stained with tobacco and red wine and

the rust of perpetual loss. Near Mabie,

West Virginia I pulled off the narrow road one

morning on my way to work as a substitute teacher.

I wanted to stand there awhile to see how bad

it was, my shuddering in ten-degree weather

on my way to something that couldn't

possibly matter. I had quit smoking and I felt

like a squirrel about to be shot, looking around

in a frenzy. There was a squirrel there, not

afraid at all, turning a hickory nut in its

hands and ignoring me. I must've looked

like what I was, a woman who had lost her

bearings and refused to admit it. It was 

another day in my history of posthumous 

days, another day when nobody touched my body.

--from Vivid Companion (Vandalia Press, 2004)