(my body)
is a
journey four
strings
plucked
from here
I’m the poet of the plain;
the poet of standing waters,
of lungs gone to seed, of
ancient seepage
but as the song gets
closer to me, it
loses its place
prairie
collapses under the eye’s
weight into a fistful of
smokestacks, a waterless
tower, five drums tagged
SIMPLE HAZARD—
grasses’ flat momen-
tum against me
all this hear
lost in the horizon,
I’s a shrinking map
a played out land “a
place that threatens
to become no place”
the sq. ft. of the black
prairie soil beneath me
“that’s the thing
about turf—it ain’t what
it used to be”
whole country,
no longer demarcated by
rivers, but fallow and
gridded, barbed and razor-
wired “Kansas City,”
Wilbert Harrison screaming
into all-night radio about
those “crazy little women”
a voice sunk in soil (not a-
cross it) territory lost in Sun-
day drives and half-assed
oblivion
some prophet yammering
about the “photosynthesis of the
heart”
the prairie gods
laugh him down—they prefer the
reptile’s cold hiss, slime mold
slipping current, the stream,
the shallow well, the spring,
the crick, the water-
hole—
“the begin of the end of things”
against the cartographer’s dream—
every water in its place, the Atlantic
shelved and every blues in its delta
—but the Lakes, the “national work
bench” or the empire’s slop sink? the
canal, the seaway, and “international
waters”
to recover the ponds
to recover the streams
to recover the aquifers
to recover myself
Photo by Denise Krebs
