Between States
[Walking the creek Springtime]
I’m remembering it took twenty minutes
for the local firefighters to reach us the night the lightning
got the attic blazing. Long enough to take a bath. I’m remembering
as the road-grader growls by somewhere, its unremitting blade
leveling the sand of a road,
bunched and rutted,
stopping the land from taking it back —
stopping it in the language of a straight line.
And I’m remembering how someone used to toss
Busch Lite empties down our crushed-limestone drive,
thrown from a passing pick-up, cans silver glossed
azure and partially crushed.
Imagining the hush
of the creekbed in winter’s crust,
ice sounding off. But it’s April and April is stinging nettles,.
sneezeweed and terse breezes, wide-awake skies, vein-blue tulips —
I’m remembering a rainstorm mudding the road even as I pedaled
home, left the bike, ran soaking through the fields following the lips
of the waterway that appeared,
articulate, weirdly
lit-up in lightning. Imagining Roma my grandmother heard
in that pasture as a child, they would canvas the farmhouse,
barter for milk. At dusk the calls of their children. Imagining
people before that who tracked this route, maybe camped
on these banks, fished, called out to a friend
a strategy or result. Could eat what they caught
without second thought. I’m remembering
the placard in the half-ring
of fading pines off Old 81
describing a people who must’ve had scores of words for
zephyr, people who (say the translators) could sing, “My children,
when at first I like the whites, my children, when at first
I liked the whites I gave them fruits, my children,”
a people whom the white government
sent surveyors to to establish a trail’s way
through these parts (my aunt use to sing
“When the prince wants an apple, he takes the tree…”)
and the envoy arrived in that grass sea
to wheedle the Osage and the Kaw,
offering $800 and a few saddles
for a promise of permanent free passage. Local trapper
as translator. He the best
they could scare up, his Kaw sketchy at best, and I’m imagining
my relatives soon flooding in
with cabinet and poppyseed,
bonnet and spring tooth, hope chest and hedgerow,
their book full of martyrs, dear as a mirror
and quilts made in the drunkards’ path
by hands that wouldn’t hold a drink, obsessed and kind
selectively, women and men enough of whom
must’ve believed when they were told to
hallucinate a past to quell a present, told
“These are the Gardens of the Desert, these / The unshorn
fields, boundless,” in blank
verse it was home to “a race, that long has
passed away” “in a forgotten language, and old tunes,” “all is
gone” though the actual act of emptying
was actually still happening
even as they set to plowing (that first time like plowing
a doormat, the sod rent open
with a sound like a zipper)
harrowing, reaping, shocking, threshing,
which is to say by 1846 the Kaw
were penned in reserves, by 1873pushed out of state, and by 1876
(“Boundaries. Forced marches. Monoculture…)
my foreparents by the powers
are granted swaths of so-called open land
to open up, and I’m imagining, first of all, much water
under no bridges, the streams like this they would’ve seen
foaming with fish, peppered with turtle, an opus of birdsong
they’ve had heard, and maybe heard also of two men
who set out from the northeast border
killing 800 wolves before they reached the Smoky Hill River,
and I’m seeing buffalo
(10,000 killed in one hunt in 1882 by men with Sharps)
as I watch a black bull corral the herd
in the paddock I’m threading through,
whose hump is a massif, whose head is
low so his body’s like a grader,
the droves rambunctious and nervous as they quick march,
they must’ve heard me in the underbrush
or the’ve heard and seen that Gleaner,
road-bound dust comet
traversing one of these little concrete(lime and clay) bridges
that’s all the speaking these roads and creeks
are wont to do with one another.
And when it’s gone, and the cattle gone, and the air cleaner,
the quietude I think not “strange and empty,” the creek
not foaming with dace, but cocoa-brown
with topsoil, the ground
greened over by recent rain, a clown-
faced cloud somersaulting slowly as a contrail
punctures her nose, plane proving a scratch
that dissolves on the cosmic glass, frail
traces of cities, I’m down here imagining the chaff
in the air of olden times
and a people, my
mother’s, who must’ve believed the line
that these contours were theirs to grid, grounds theirs”years/
before” they landed this “gift outright” blank “still unstoried, artless
unenhanced” for the taking
like a creeper takes that cottonwood
by the ears, takes what it wants, while still giving
an impression of peace to a poet
having a sit before he blunders on with his eclogue,
passing not through a prairie, not
through a woodland, but through a prairie woodland
(technical term for this band of life, woods along streams
surrounded by oceans of grass,
I’m remembering the way, flying in, the creeks seem to cross
the gridded roads like veins drawn over graph paper)
which natives and settlers relied on, spotted afar, to locate
what water there was
among networks of vines and tough shrubs
that clinch these muddy lips,
this mustache of canopied verdure running a few feet on either
bank, a curt succession
from lovegrass, dropseed, bluestem, to great big trees
rising from “abominable desolation”
where “nothing points” though it happens to be home
to lady’s slipper and pheasant and kingfisher and windmill-grass
and what are states to them? What are states
to bobcat and nitrogen-eating bacteria and dung beetle
and racerunner and sunflower, to carpets of sorghum, beans
cornfields replete with large centipedish machines, woodland
a slender band of betweenness, whose meandering logic
seems but is not whimsy through the subsoil. Of course
this state already had a song. Had “revery,” had “chants going forth”
like how the Pawnee would sing before battle,
“let us see, is this real,
let us see, is this real,
let us see, is this real,
this life that I am living?”
I’m looking where a log points, a slippery log
that makes its point over the real froth
as I waver on it between real banks to the real knob
the trunk lands on, this land of lightning bug and common gray moth,
of the misnamed prairie dog
not canine but squirrel, the meadowlark not
any kind of lark, the horn toad not
toad but spiked lizard, the jack rabbit truly a hare,
the prairie chicken truly a grouse, the locust
a false acacia, even the buffalo were
really a species of bison, but in their crush
to have and sow the place
I can picture the settlers’ pinkish faces
and sometimes glee as they attach their names
to things like catlinite, pipestone, maroon erratic
tracked in on the feet of glaciers crushing spruce forests,
used (and called what?) by First Peoples
for carving pipes, fine-grained, soft,
picked up by my loner grandma
who’d pick over roadsides, scour the gravel drive
for wheatsized one-celled fusulinids, searching them out
as if divinities slept in minerals, in chips
of meteorite and shark teeth,
and I’m remembering that it wasn’t the land that carved me apart
but a system of culture, a school of
flak from an elder if you couldn’t pull a straight furrow,
whose term for the leftover corners
of wheat left standing at the cambered angle
of a turning combine’s path
was jews. I’m remembering someone saying he hadn’t
done his jews yet. And I’m imagining the neighbor in a CASE hat
sweating as he forces the waterway in his field
to flow straight, trenches out the curves, tautens the meander
to get a few more acres of arable land. Plow
the dew under, went the old saying. Meaning
get out there early and turn the soil, culture
of extraction displacing itself, its sports teams
called the Pipeliners and the Threshers,
the wells failing, the farms drying up, the schools
consolidating, and I’m remembering mine was a school of
milk all over my locker, of laying tacks on an outcast’s chair,
the usual cruelty with a rural edge,
remembering that I, who got kicked in the spine,
had my own complicities
in the unstated contract of “freaks for export only”—
all that projected emptiness. Only the land was always a solace.
I recall it as I cross now under a bridge at the bend
in the road that was Empire, cattle town, “erased,” felt one
newcomer to the prairie, “blotted out” — I’ve always loved
that unrolled vertigo, a sky that swallows you —
and I hear again the grader hacking
somewhere back around the section, his angle blade
a balm to the quadrangle’s party,
which gave us passable roads and the persistence of windmills,
he’s following the latticework his ancestors laid
over branchings of stream and river
(which look from above like leafless trees
or paint peeling, or like cracks in the wall)
“Eternal prairie and grass, with occasional groups of trees,
Frémont prefers this
to every other landscape,” Charles Preuss
wrote on their way to taking California, “To me
it’s as if someone would prefer a book
of blank pages,” and always
I want to linger in those pages
but I’m imagining the “tension
between singing and the journey,” remembering
people I knew who worked red-eyes
at the hatchery in the nearby dying town, who’d brag
of killing runts in creative ways, knocking them to slime,
Candace, Carmen, and the Hacker boys,
figures grown up with
who don’t know what figures they seem
for whiteness and sex and bored destruction. I’m remembering
some uncle saying, Best not to marry
on the other side of the creek —
but I say a border is also a world,
zone of cottonwood hackberry luxurious weeds towering
and scarcely a human presence, a golden haze
where monarchs lunge and bounce
in private liberated gloom
that must from above look like giant
interlocking hooks, I’m imagining the bobolink’s view
who flies with the aid of the stars,
how a month ago the stream was ice,
how an hour ago a mare was stretching her neck
over barbed-wire fences
for the sweeter grass, and I’m imagining
these stinging nettles in my path
electrify my shins, imagining my stanza standing
for the grid within me, while my lines run on
like creeks across pastures, beneath a huge sun
of remembering, already halved by the line of the land,
land half imagined, half vanished
as a fog comes
not upon the earth but out of it.