Disciple

“… most everything I have ever learned, including how to
write, I picked up at Black Mountain College …”
■   Michael Rumaker

Early June 1952
McCarthy amok –
Michael Rumaker, nee Romejko,

apostate Catholic,
South Philly exile, queer,
on the lam, in search of sanctuary,

breaches the Continental Divide
at the climax of Old Fort Mountain.
Counties McDowell and Buncombe

marry in dawn rime. Black bears
roam red spruce and Fraser Fir.
Wildcats cry. At such altitude,

blossoms fruit late on the cane.
Frost whispers. Clouds mass.
Michael divines omen

in the beckoning: Blue Ridge,
Black Mountain Range,
beyond a billion years extant –

the place he’s glimpsed but in visions.
He travels State Street into the village,
somehow finds, by sheer desire,

secreted off Hwy. 70,
the scarred macadam:
nameless save for numbers on a stob,

queued with ancient split rail, Levitical
hardwoods, columbine, turkey beard,
may-apple, fire pink – rainforest lush.

A stranger, toting his pittance,
bindle and traps, he yearns to scriven:
In the beginning was the word …

Through the gate, he crosses
the baseball diamond.
The last of its dandelions

gone white sway.
By the Round House,
then to the Quiet House

where he genuflects,
absolved in the ether.
Across Lake Eden, shrouded

in mist, glitters the Studies Building.
Upon its pylons,
Charlot’s murals bide oracular.

Michael shields his eyes, evangelized.
The Seven Sisters drape
in morning-blue shawls.

■   Joseph Bathanti

Joseph Bathanti is the former North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor. The author of over twenty books, Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University. He will be inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in October of 2024. In 1992, he became close friends with BMC writer Fielding Dawson and, for the remaining years of Dawson’s life, Bathanti and Dawson offered creative writing workshops every spring to prisoners confined by the NC Department of Correction.