Prairie
Sure
Would
I miss the way a breeze dimples
the
butter-colored curtains on Sunday mornings,
or
nights gnashed by cicadas and thunderstorms?
The
leaning gossip, the half-alive ripple
of
sunflowers, sagging eternities of corn
and
sorghum, September preaching yellow, yellow
in
all directions, the windowsills swelling
with
Mason jars, the blue sky bluest borne
through
tinted glass above the milled grains?
The
dust, the heat, distrusted, the screen door
slapping
as the slat-backed porch swing sighs,
the
hatch of houseflies, the furlongs of freight trains,
and
how they sing this routine, so sure, so sure—
the
rote grace of every tempered life?