nothing but this continent
intent on its dismay—
hands, etc. bandaged,
a torn petticoat fringed
with lace, roseate frozen
fingers, or elsewhere
feet wrapped in burlap
scuffing new snow
after the indigo of their tunics
seeps back into the soil
this spring, the several springs’
dulling thaw and incidental greenery
what marks they made were
harrowed out by those who settled,
so set themselves against the land
whether to keep the land
open to passage
or parcel it to the plow
Benton and Everett argued
“English tartars,” some said,
white savages to plunder the trade,
“only farmer and tradesman stabilize”
his head raised slightly
the dying woodsman
views the open plains,
“flat water” squalls
spilling stiff grasses
into the small shade a stand
of scrub trees gives his end
“huge skulls and whitening
bones of buffalo
were scattered everywhere”
the Conestoga’s canvas
straining to the wind,
the plow’s first bite,
the first indenture
of the rutted road,
crossties set down,
oil, asphalt glittering
quartz aggregate to the sun
the harrow’s bright discs
crumble the damp shine
of the new furrow,
the wind dulls and sifts
grassland into dust
two days in the storm cellar,
wet rags to their faces,
the slatted door impacted
with wet rags, dowery linens
strange light at the cyclone’s
onset, a cupped brightness
edging banks of dark clouds,
fields darkening in lines
of gathering dust, section
on section spilling eastward,
a straw drilled through a tree,
a team of mules transported
forty miles intact
a dream of transport, Dorothy
soaring on the wind, becalmed
follows billboards and Burma Shave
into the city’s ragged sprawl
Uptown or Lakeview, five
children in three rooms, A.D.C.,
weathers like unpainted wood,
stacked porches where her laundry
tatters with city grit, bars
haunted by banjo music
everybody talks of home
as though it were the sparkle
of an earlier dream, a glint
of rainwater in someone’s hair,
names you can’t remember,
old photographs gone brown
with age, a man and woman,
faces obscured by broad hats,
a bare tree beside them,
the bare distances empty
and faded into the sky
Oxus, Phasis, Palmyra—
Oz encased in glass,
“variegated with fields and meadows”
store window dioramas
display the life and manners
of high-rise glass apartments—
The El Dorado, Malibu East—
warm winters, cool summers
high above the city’s noise
clouds move in facets
across their polished faces,
tipped red at sunset, presiding
over a close-set clutter
of flat, graveled roofs
graceful as mannequins
they are laughing into
the summer evening, women
bright as spring flowers,
in autumn’s colors,
warmed and smiling,
they talk of love
before a dying fire
gray as she is, aging,
she fingers the pictures
of ladies’ magazines,
fingers, as well, pictures
she brought from home
the red flowers on the floor
wear into black treads, black
dust comes in at her windows
his weapons arranged at his side,
the sun darkening his sight,
Cooper contrived his death
in alien spaces; Boone finished
his days on a crumbling porch
that fronted on the open West
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