> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.fsm.ink/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Bootleg Mountain, Jocassee Gorges
- URL: https://www.fsm.ink/bootleg-mountain-jocassee-gorges/
- Published: 2023-02-07T00:39:33.000Z
- Updated: 2026-06-03T18:45:07.000Z
- Author: Staff
- Tags: Poetry, #Import 2026-08-03 09:59

*by Keith Phelps*

Old things  
A crowded gallery of pitch pines  
 And huckleberry bushes spreading like a high tide   
Straddle the bedrock ridge  
Almost pushing the world off  
This lichen gumline with its sparse granite teeth

A black bear  
Gouged its claws on the bark of not one   
But three trees here  
And I swear I saw  
 Epicormic sprouts   
 Tending the grooves

Anise lingered on my fingers   
From the goldenrod  
And other observations   
Pointed to disrupted cycles  
 Too much work from mountain laurel   
 Too little fire from human

We stood in that time  
Feeling our lungs converse around us   
While we measured  
The land that was there  
 All there  
 Yawning to its task:  
*Hello to Cherokee and its painted bears!*  
*Hello to Soapstone Church and its mothers!*  
*Hello to kudzu pulling the weight of sky to us!*   
*Hello to medicine in yucca and yellowroot!*  
*Hello to transmission wire cutting the mountains!*

The land does not forget  
And it even made me remember you   
And the time we watched  
The bull moose  
 Travel from the water through the paper birch   
 Its beard dripping lake mud all the while

Here on the mountain head  
We noted names growing in-situ  
We remarked how changed this view was   
The loss and the hope of it all  
The way people and past linger  
Like timber rattlesnakes on two tracks

We waded through the mountain laurel   
 Following needle and GPS  
 Down to the worn pickup  
 Hoping we were changed and hoping we wouldn’t forget