Nebraska/Kansas

Nebraska
Part I

The Platte’s muddy
Ribbon, twists,
Braids, plaited
With trees that suck
The life, the water,
from the river.

The “divide” (a?)
Between Little Blue
And Republican Rivers:
Cather’s land.

II

Soybeans, squat, bushy.
Corn majestic tall.
Both in a blue bowl sky.
Pivots of water
Puddles and pools,
where cows come to stand.
Rolls. (Rolling?)
Into Kansas.
Prairie becoming a cultivated carpet.
A land I can shrug on,
Glove my feet,
Root them in blue stem
And buffalo grass.

Kansas III
If I “can’t go home again”—why
Do I feel so alive?
Under endless sky?
Wind that whips
Yet caresses and wraps its arms around my body.
Rhizome, planted
To keep me still.
A voice wakes me.
Why do I undulate?
my emotions like the limestone
struggling to break
through the surface
of the humps of hills.
(the ocean underneath the waves)
Once when I was a child
I held a seashell
found lying in a cow pasture.
White as the cumulous clouds
Stacked in the east.
I marveled at its placement
Without a present sea.


If all I am
Is formed by 15
Can the mountains
Ever take the place of sky?

Why do I fight?
To twist, twine myself
In the grassy earth?
Will my skin
Flake off like chips
Of limestone exposed
By the cut of the road?
Are the scars of my life
Imprinted like the fossil shells
On limestone fence posts?

IV

I can’t be the fence
I can’t keep the barb sharp
The electricity
Cannot flow.
It will keep rolling
Heaving past
The telephone lines.
The prairie surges,
Swells fecund,
Fructiferous,
And I can’t ask myself
“Can the mountains ever take this place?”


V
I am hot-wired
To these forsaken farms.
Barns slivered gray, collapsing
Inward, to let the sky fall over them.
The roads dwindle to grass,
Velutinous over earth.

Dusty toes leave tracks
In the earth
Like dinosaurs left tracks in limestone rock.
The puddles from thunderstorms
The night before vaguely brings to mind
some other timely tragic
upheaval.
(Seas sucked to ground and sucked up to heaven)


To be continued….