Between Wytheville, Virginia <br />and the North Carolina line, <br />he meets a wagon headed <br />where he's been, seated beside <br />her parents a dark-eyed girl <br />who grips the reins in her fist, <br />no more than sixteen, he's guess <br />as they come closer and she <br />doesn't look away or blush <br />but allows his eyes to hold <br />hers that moment their lives pass. <br />He rides into Boone at dusk, <br />stops at an inn where he buys <br />his supper, a sleepless night <br />thinking of fallow fields still <br />miles away, the girl he might <br />not find the like of again. <br />When dawn breaks he mounts his roan, <br />then backtracks, searches three days <br />hamlets and farms, any smoke <br />rising above the tree line <br />before he heads south, toward home, <br />the French Broad's valley where spring <br />unclinches the dogwood buds <br />as he plants the bottomland, <br />come night by candlelight builds <br />a butter churn and cradle, <br />cherry headboard for the bed, <br />forges a double-eagle <br />into a wedding ring and then <br />back to Virginia and spends <br />five weeks riding and asking <br />from Elk Creek to Damascas <br />before he finds the wagon <br />tethered to the hitching post <br />of a crossroads store, inside <br />the girl who smiles as if she'd <br />known all along his gray eyes <br />would search until they found her. <br />She asks one question, his name, <br />as her eyes study the gold <br />smoldering there between them, <br />the offered palm she lightens, <br />slips the ring on herself so <br />he knows right then the woman <br />she will be, bold enough match <br />for a man rash as his name.<br /><br />Ron Rash<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-exchange/
