By Evan Gurney

from Folk Medical Lexicon of South Central Appalachia

The phrase that mountain folk
coined for this condition

provides its own lesson
in the semantics of vertigo,

its participial movement
staggering to and fro,

unmoored by prepositions,
the grammar gone dizzy too

as those twinned verbs spin
into gerundive nouns,

all meaning aptly erratic,
out of tune, each stave’s

horizontal bars failing to fix
in place its pitch, which drifts

off the scale like a ship
that has lost its horizon

among the many staves
in this timbered ocean

of hollow, ridge, and cove
that roll and reel and veer

until I look up, I sing out,
I pitch over, I’m staved in.

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Evan Gurney is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His poems and essays have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Appalachian Review, Contrary, storySouth, Tar River Poetry, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere.