I am two weeks off a prairie sky.
Reluctant islander, what I don’t know of
spring and neap, urchin barrens
denuded of green. How you laugh
at my bafflement, night-swimming the bay,
spooned in phosphorescence.
Your casual negotiation of
basalt’s black tongue, limbs of beaches
kelp-sleek, slattern with sea.
At dusk, you show me
gifts stolen from the shore: moon snails,
bottle glass in submerged shades. […]
Plough swinging early on the hills’ horizon,
the blue-clay turn of skeith and share,
and what catches: rogue oats in dawn sun.
This bowl of land and what it gathers.
Farmstead, firebreak. Cottonwoods
flagged with shagbark pennons,
dugout sulking green. How far
is enough? Where the foothold
skirting memory, like the first furrow
on a new-turned field, distanced out of recall?
The cattle’s backs bowed […]
less about grain thanthe slim thighs of landlost to drought sculptedby hard weatherand how to explain to your wifethe rich dark stirof spring earth
she circumscribed inthe domestic geraniums crocus corms like knucklebones
and what you lack
a means to […]
Robinhood, 1991
as if one phone call couldfend off the ghosts
coming into townpickup shunting like a heiferthrough the potholes bunting lapping at the church eavesgrass lopped & bundled &ubiquitous ham sandwiches that double for weddings and funerals
if collective wishful thinkingcould backcrank the clock it’d look like this
church […]
1.
first the farmsteads slip under to wind or drought spring clapboard warping lichen like sparrowprint
towns taken graduallylimb by limb […]
