Somehow

the Prairie is bigger than  your house

Bigger than your hometown, home-state

Let alone colonizing pretensions, virtual hinterlands.

 

It swallows  you up

into the primordial spaces of its cavernous maw

 roaming across the Directions, eagle-scanning

  this supplanted contemporary parasite world

As if it were a gnat or mutant virus

Bobbing about on the surface, ludicrous

brandishing its miniscule ego/sword

As if it could conquer, champion, extinguish

Those wind-bent, flower-spattered wildernesses

Patched with countless squiggles of lake and pool

And buffalo-jumping escarpments

Bee and bird-filled nothings;

How the enormous air swoops over the rolling waves of grass

Caressing and catalyzing every spike, petal and twig of sage

Blue with the blobs of vetch

And the duck-bending reed-beds.

 

Even your cattle,  fat and square

near the granaries, waiting by the abbatoir

are over-shadowed and evanesced

by the imprint of great creatures

lumbering through the Ages,

gallumphing over those same un-belonging spaces

the ghost-echo of bison swarming

across these edgeless contours and perspective.

tagged  ecologically by the footloose ancestors of today

and the dinosaur shapes of the Past

too potent to be displaced or tamed

by the cement, the steel and micro-chips

of territorial intent

 and whiteman’s version of how to sleep safe at night

 self-armed, sliced up and compartmentalized

behind his puny  sidings  and stucco  palisades

swaddled in consumer blankets

as threadbare as any of his dreams

in the places where tornadoes patrol the horizons like the stalking wolf

 

This is No-man’s land – but its own.