Three AM

I fix up the pillows, 

I close my eyes,

I've taken care of 

Everything that

Came along today, needing

Taking care of. 

So I keep my eyes closed

And I figure, when they've 

Adjusted, I'll see something

Out there in my own

Vast beyond, sometimes 

Red barn rooftops, sometimes 

Shapes of the garden in 

My night vision, the odd 

Light of it pulling my watching out

To the old barn. 

When I opened my

Eyes, the blackest night was 

There waiting. Tonight the fog

Lifted.

Hiraeth

Cranes 
Are my spirit animal. 

Memories, people,

These creatures of my past and place, 

My great plains, 

Tangle altogether in 

Some living entity right on 

The other side of my reality,

In beautiful shade 

There all the time,

The web of my relations and that

Past durable, known and unknown, 

Perhaps forgotten,

But as clear as 

A ringing bell across 

The prairie comes the bedrock:

I loved them and they loved me

On that 

River of birds, that 

Grassland of sky,

And there was all relation. 

They will tell me

What I am supposed to do,

The cranes, they always have.

My grandfathers.

Learning

An agitation settles.

I can't seem to shake its noose,

Though maybe I'm not

Supposed to.

I try to fit my desolation

Into the waiting slots,

But none of them are vast

Enough, although my

Great Plains are.

How is it that I carry home,

Try to tell what it is for me,

When I'm not sure what

These ghosts,

These ancestors

Require?

These beings in my

In between spaces

Crowd me, now, since I'm 

No longer young, and 

Mortality is soft, nestling

Into my lakes, 

My high northern plateau, my

Forest place, the 

Architecture of this nature

Here, regeneration, 

View and shelter, 

Now bringing prairie home.

I am listening,

Ghosts and ancestors,

For what I'm to leave behind

Fugitive

Looks like it is snowing

Though hard to tell looking out into

An unilluminated landscape, 

Over the tops of

Our red metal roofs,

Standing seam,

House and barns.

Each roof is 

A slightly different red,

And slightly different quality, and 

In some cases the handiwork

Of those who really 

Understood the 

Art of shelter persisting in 

The elements, so 

Here I am, looking out

Across the all of it, into this

Country night, breathing quiet and 

Trying to describe it all,

I think it was

For you. 

Derecho

Finally it started to snow a bit.
I knew we weren't going to
Have a foot of snow like
The prognosticators said,
I thought we'd have just a little.

For one thing, besides
The obvious boggy grey warm of
Days in this new mid-February,
Winds like these, lately,
Don't bring that much snow.
I sniff the air and release my
Prairie bones to my own durable
Signals.

These are unsettled winds,
I should say, unsettled
For this season;
They are steady,
They are near-straight line, and
I find them odd, these
Derecho winds in winter, tho
I've been living through them in
These last few days,
Waking.

This

Sitting here just now

And watching, I am

Looking at

The sky, the moon again.

Last night, rather it was 

This morning, moon blazing, going 

Down beyond 

The other side of the world,

She woke me up, so 

I watched for a moment

Riding that western dip slipping into 

Oh beautiful an unobstructed sky,

Easterly light coming round, 

And I listened, dawn sounds faint 

In small waked moments before I 

Fell asleep again, and I dreamed 

To sleep this day.

I needed to 

Be still amid cacaphony, amid 

The noise.

My mother comes, her 

Beautiful miasma

Envelopes me somehow;

My mother now takes root,

Her words not many,

Though I remember these,

Clear as air, sweet gentled 

On my shoulders:

We take love where we find it.

Dark the canvas

In and out those years

And these, 

And uncertain my bravado

I try to integrate 

It all, each memory 

Making wondrous

Every current so that I can

Keep on going. 

Things I'd Want to Tell You

Trouble everywhere but

This morning, driving through 

Dense drifts of snow,

Palpable, hanging in

The air, blowing

Across fields and back roads,

Everything was white

Brightest grays, though 

Now and then sky broke

Into a bit of blue, quickly gone

Into the clerestory

Of light shadowing the stark 

Architecture of bare trees

Against the landscape, and 

All the while 

Snow falling through erratic 

Sunlight was just so 

Fleeting gorgeous, 

Hymning, dancing 

Wind-borne

Into the waiting balance.