A Panhandle Eden

Where others saw a forest, Callaway pictured Eden:

rivers that cut through steephead ravines

to shift in purpose in the sand.

Here the Chatahoochee becomes the Tigris,

Spring Creek befits the Euphrates. The rivers

Flint and Fish Pond complete the quartet—

four fingers of the Apalachicola. Headwaters

that flow through lands of onyx, resin and gold.

Here Dukes Creek begs the land of Havilah,

Ur in the Georgia Valleys.

Turning off State Road 12 for the trail-head,

long-leaf pines rise from sand-hill slopes.

A flat table covered in leaf litter marks

where a rib was prised from Adam’s side,

where bone tissue did the work of clay.

Among mountain laurel and Indian grass

are undulations that Callaway said denoted

the foundations of a home; a mound

marks Adam’s grave.

Crossing seepage streams, the path

is flanked by dogwood and swamp tupelo,

the heavens a dense canopy of beech,

sparkleberry, pyramid magnolia.

It was in this variety of trees that Callaway

entrusted faith that this was Eden.

Forests of ash, fig and yew,

and of cedar that gives off a stink when bruised—

the weight and angle of its grain

strong enough to build an Ark.

Here pockets of myrrh and palm conjure images

of the East, while hazel, juniper and fir

suggest a world more pagan.

Beneath the forest floor, the river

oxbows. Fence posts stop hikers

from tumbling down to red clay marl.

Framed between the fronds, Alum Bluff rises,

its edges exposed crust, revealing corrugated shells

and rock-face tinted in strokes of emerald and ochre.

Here the earth’s plates are prised open,

shell beds exposed like a house’s frame.

Layers of Miocene and Pleistocene reveal imprints:

ferns, thick-husked fruits, fragments of dugong bone.

The group of hikers pick through prehistoric seeds.

They make camp beside a copperhead

camouflaged beneath the leaf litter.

The clang of pans, their campfire talk,

enough to wake this patch of paradise.