Cottonwood Blue

If I could forget the plains behind this stand,

forget the train car and how I first saw

brown clouds tabled against a ceiling of heat,

I could imagine this river valley

gave relief to land, that these tallest trees

diced sky into music above the oxbow

lake where bodies sink surely as pilings

set each spring for temporary docks,

where foundations lower houses like bait

for the leviathan rising of frost.

But it is summer. Useless cottonwoods

do not crack in cold. They've thrown a storm

of pith and down across lawn and screens.

Through field glasses each tree becomes the small

woodland of childhood. This too is dust.

What we imagined when we came here becomes

detritus of wind, the linty pickings of pockets.

Only the eye rejoices at them. Sight is no

carpenter, knows of nothing to do with wood and space

but to call the body out into the evening.

Night is the water we swim, unsafe by nature

of its color and the long light of farms

carrying trains of grain and chemicals east

into the mirror of sunset, dull, unsilvered by heat.

What I have come to remember is not here.

The flat statement of green elevators rises

across a mile of prairie grass. The mind

circles in flammable dust, considers

an old tautology of feast and vermin, crops

and livestock repeating the expected line.

In last light, the scheduled thunderstorm

comes driving the town to dinner, builds

a mountain range to dwarf the land. One butte

collapses into ridge after ridge of night,

a fierce knowledge playing its slopes

long after the dark has fallen

and houselights sink into the earth.