The Great Plains

The sun is coming up

Over the plains, the greenbrown prairies,

You can drive and drive forever

And see nothing but flat brown fields

With the wind charging through…

Buffalo cloudshadows ripple across the land…

Cottonwoods lean odd angled in the valleys,

Over the water where big carp rise

In the dark riffles of evening

And stars shudder in the indigo.

O, the names of rivers! -

The Cimarron, the Red, the Brazos, the Purgatoire,

The Trinity, the Big Sandy, the Canadian, the Arkansas, the Smoky Hill,

The Solomon, the Republican, the Arikaree, the Frenchman,

The Little Blue, the Big Blue, the South Platte, the North Platte,

The Laramie, the Loup, the Niobrara, the White Earth,

The Owl, the Cheyenne, the Cannonball, the Grand,

The Heart, the Knife, the Yellowstone,

The Missouri and the Little Missouri,

The Tongue, the Powder, the Musselshell, the Bighorn,

The Judith, the Marias, the Milk.

I dream of the empty villages of the Mandan and the Hidatsa,

The earth lodges collapsed and vanished,

Leaving smallpox scars.

When the buffalos were slaughtered by the white men

They lay so thick on the ground that you

Could walk for miles on their bodies

And the bones were used to make fertilizer and china.

Bonnie and Clyde drove far and hard across these plains,

Running a thousand miles at a stretch, just for fun,

Kidnapping, robbing, killing, outrunning the law,

With their pet white rabbit on the backseat of the automobile,

And when they stopped Clyde would play his saxophone,

While bonnie read true-romance magazines

And painted her toenails pink and dyed her hair red

To match her shoes and dresses.

All these abandoned farms adrift in the fields:

When all their enterprise had come to nothing

The owners just walked away and left them,

Among the dinosaur bones and prehistoric tools.

Out here you can cry like a coyote,

Where dust devils spin across the horizon

And lightning streaks upward and down in the distance,

Thunderstorms wander barefoot over the earth;

And you can gallop into the earth and sky,

Shouting at the heavens with ridiculous joy

While tumbleweed rolls and bounces in the wind,

Flies through the air, piles up against fences…