Moonlight Yodel

"In the pale moonlight" is a cliché,

so I won't use it in my down-home poem

about our stroll last night across your farm,

a stroll that took us to corncribs,

roll of barbed wire, rusted water pump,

cedar trees, stacked elm logs, orchard grass,

small hill of shelled corn, tumbleweed, mailbox.

I won't use "stroll" either, by golly,

because that's a word a bit too cute

for an outback Illinois word-slinger.

And, come to think about it, my girl,

walking-in-the-moonlight poems are old hat.

Instead, I'll write about how you woke up

the Beauchamp family, a dozen dogs,

sixteen cats, and who knows how many birds,

when you proved to me you could yodel.

"Tm from Yellow Medicine County," you said,

as if that explained the whole thing.