What My Father Ate

He ate what he couldn’t eat,
what his mother taught him not to:
brown grass, small chips of wood, the dirt
beneath his gray dark fingernails.  

He ate the leaves off trees.  He ate bark.
He ate the flies that tormented
the mules working in the fields.
He ate what would kill a man

in the normal course of his life:
leather buttons, cloth caps, anything
small enough to get into his mouth.
He ate roots.  He ate newspaper.  

In his hungry, clumsy slowness
he did what the birds did, picked
for oats or corn or any kind of seed
in the dry dung left by the cows.

***

The broad view, not the details,  
the rivets on the wings, not  
the wings themselves,  
not forward, craning, askew  
and the wind merely  
hypothetical  
over prairie dogs,  
cacti, a wide yellow western  
sky and all that sunset happening  
just out of reach, friends  
reading articles  
to improve themselves    

but not really flying, not seeing  
broken faces on the ground  
trod in poverty and war  
beneath our feet,  
love hiding from us  
never quite removing her glove,  
nature sitting all too  
grand, a stiff grandmother  
whose limpid eyes  
we dare not ask to keep—    

Our landing is a jolt,  
a bottom we get to without
being there.

***

FORGOTTEN COUNTRY

Such is the land of fecundity:
Flat to the north, where the glacier
stemmed topsoil yards deep
with untold seeds
of earthly generations

To the south, hilly
with the burrowings of beauty,
horse country trees densing
up and down along
slipstreams swallowing
beneath ridges that chewed.  

No one sees this who drives by.
Few who live here know
the bones that belie
under their withering gaze.  

Such a monastery of the mind.
A godly paradise of wild
blooming, blowing, feathery
gold prairiemath.  

Let us pray to find ourselves here:
Where the sun is long, horizon
drawn with bumps of trees
and strands of cloud
thin as a madam’s scarf,

striped barns rounding and mares
nickering and houses that stand alone
eyeing across each field what
we are in this place:

A people plentied by sky and soil,
where growing is a gift
we know without looking,
rivers strain and pull
downward to origins, self a root
among roots en route to our seasons.

     ***

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