Nebraska

2nd draft

The Platte's muddy
ribbon, twists,
braids, plaited
with trees that suck
the life, the water,
from the river.

The Divide (a?)
between the Little Blue
and Republican river-
The Land:
Willa's home.

II
Soybeans, bushy in green,
Corn, majestic tall in a blue bowl sky,
dipping and swaying in a constant prairie wind.
Puddles and pools
where cows come to stand,
circular pivots with dried out corners.
Rolls (rolling) into Kansas.
Prairie carpets:
a land I can shrug on,
implant my feet,
root in blue stem
and buffalo grass.

III
Kansas


If I "can't go home
again"- why
do I feel so alive under endless sky?

Winds whip,
and wrap arms
around my body.
Rhizome. Planted
to keep me still,
a voice that wakes me.

my emotions undulate
like the limestone
(dead creatures of forgotten seas)
struggling
to break through surface grass?
The ocean underneath the waves.

(Once when I was a child
I held a seashell,
found lying in a Kansas cow pasture.
White as cumulus stacked in the east.
I marveled at its placement
without a present sea.)

I fight
to twist, twine myself
in the grassy earth.
If all I am
is formed by 15,
can the mountains
ever take the place of sky?

Will my skin flake off like chips
of limestone
exposed by the cut of the road?
Are the scars of my life imprinted like fossil shells
in scattered debris of rock?
or fence post crooked on the wind?

I can't be the fence.
I can't be the barb sharp.
the electricity
can not flow.
It should roll,
heaving past
fence lines
while the prairie surges,
swells, fecund,
fructiferous.

IV

I am hot wired
to these forsaken farms,
barns silvered gray,
collapsing inward to let the sky
fall in them.

The roads that dwindle to grass,
velutinous over earth.
Dusty toes leave tracks
in the primordial mud,
puddles left from the thunderstorm the night before.
the road of my youth crawled over those familiar hills:
dinosaur hill,
plum valley,
dump hill,
buffalo slough,
snake cellar.

V

There be monsters hidden in those ancient farm implements.
teeth rusting evil in the afternoon sun.
A neck of a monster
that would chase me if I dared to look him in the eye.
(Just as I dreamed of tornadoes with evil personalities chasing me with intent to kill)

Was it a mother's warning
that instilled fear?
or a father's
admonition to stay clear,
that KEPT
me from the mossy steps in dank the earth
a cellar drear, monsters ....

In the distance
the windmill clangs
as it switches gears,
cows bellow at feeding time
(I remember fetching cows!
"Cum Boss. Cum Boss.")

grassy fragrant rich manure dries:
land minds to avoid in pasture fields.
The cotton woods rustle to whisper their secrets
to me on afternoon breeze.
Meadowlarks whistle my name and bobwhites "killdeer".
a hint of water, mixed with ripening plum.
life on a Kansas Prairie.