Between the morning and the afternoon storm,

I drove the lunch and the dog out east

through the yet unplanted fields,

where big oil has quietly left its mark.

Cylindrical, tan vessels perch at the corners of farms on top of county roads;

underwritten barrels of the prairie promised to be smaller.

 

The radio crackles from distant lightning when I arrive,

and just as I exit the car, her age-hushed voice calls from the tiny house; a

well-built, obvious survivor of the tornado that happened nine years ago.

 

The table where we dine is pressed into a corner of her kitchen. Paint peels

from around the heating vent at her threadlike ankles, warm air pushes into

softened polyester.

 

There is a clear window overlooking a bird feeder and the darkened sky

beyond; I like to watch the weather too, I assure her. Yes–And the birds—who

flutter around the homemade contraption as we watch, despite the

metronomic bark of the dog in the car.

 

The silver blue heads of prairie blackbirds twitch their quick necks at the

window; wind stirs the incomplete pattern of chimes on a leaning pergola,

and her words are saved only for things she wants to remember:

 

her husband and the child buried in the yard,

her children and their children,

the medicine she sips from a straw,

where she keeps the unused plastic bags, and what time her evening

caregiver comes.

 

The rain starts to fall when I leave. The resigned dog has given up his voice

by then, and his face is pressed against the window;

whisker smears in the condensation.

 

She is too weak to wave from the clear window, but I can see the bright blue

of her eyes through the rain, smiling at the silly dog

and the moisture gathering on the thrilled taupe of her lawn.

 

 

Lately, I’ve been moved by too many things that move:

the chainsaw that cut the towering tree.

It fell to the ground in a struggle; layers of brilliant fall leaves like grown-out

hair put to rest.

I liked that tree.

 

And the field just north of our house.

Once it was a place to run—the golden grass of any season, really, meeting

my hips like brushing hands.

You can let it all go here, the speaking hands would say.

And there now, the Eiffel point of an oil rig is a baritone hum at night. Constant

and constantly lit.

I liked that field.

 

Even the backyard snakes who’ve met an untimely death

and the mice and wasps and spiders; each symmetric stripe and incisive

pointed ear; each delicate, specific detail formed flawless and inimitable.

The flowers.

 

And the doves who dive before the cars, and the raccoons and cats, and the

grasshoppers we never see, but beseige the feathergrass and winter wheat,

flitting for brief seconds in the air before they can’t.

I’ve loved them all.

 

But with greater force still,

I’ve discovered that I will love them again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Right now she sits in the hot, still air of the front room.

The clock behind her is faster than her heartbeat, but it goes too slow.

She is silent and has sunken into the chair like one of its pillows; had she not been wearing white, he would have searched more to find her there.

That morning, he pulled the oversized shirt for its color and tried it over her hanging arms and midsection; his fingers touched the place where their children grew.

Then with his thick, curled fingers he grabbed her stockinged feet thinking that when you’re old, love is one of those things that doesn’t get bigger no matter how often it’s watered.

You’ve already given each other everything, somehow–left it all on the arena floor like when he was riding broncs in the rodeo.

When he hit the dirt it didn’t matter.

Just last week, someone listed their house in the mountains–the one in the basin of sunlight where all of the life happened. Their only home.

The door she painted red was pretty, and now there are yellow finches and a family of starlings nesting into its frame.

There are cobwebs there too, but they are host to full-bellied orb weavers:

in the same wind she use to face and let her hair whip back behind her, the cobwebs’ corners detach and swing an intricate silken weave of their history.

And the driveway–no longer lined with her carefully selected annuals is taken over by milkweed and crabgrass and wildflowers.

There are snakes who fill those grasses now, and there are bees just above them, intent on replacing life with life.

He knows she wants to join them there in that wild dirt,

where she will bring his steady love with her, so soon.

But until then, the clock advances behind her,

and he holds tight to her stockinged feet.

 

 

 

He was the one she came to first;

dragging her wounded leg through the doggy door

then down the hall and up the stairs to his room where she knew he would be

and laid along the length of her sleeping boy.

 

In the morning she was weak and the children didn’t know

what the choices were.

 

Can we save her, mama? They never asked—imagining a pink cast and a fast-

healing leg.

And when she came home again, she carried the arch of innumerable stitches

over the span of her hip

where there was no pillow of fur

over no presence of leg.

 

We tended to her scar so that it became a map of the path she crawled to find

him that night;

it healed without us knowing exactly what it took.

 

Patiently, she worked until her balance returned

and soft tufts of fur covered the certain line where her leg used to be.

 

On three legs, she brings him her gifts now;

she hears his cries and feels his

moods before he does.

 

And she would never miss a night to sleep by his side,

where friendships commenced in other worlds, collide.

When I left the mountains,

there was a space in the pit of my belly

that thought it couldn’t be filled

with things like the things at my back:

the mule deer in the falcate sun,

sideways on a morning hill;

footprints of an elk and her calf

pressing into a natural spring

before the soft earth was hardened;

the nighttime yelp of coyotes and rabbits—

not always a genial sound

but a reminder of the wild world at work.

 

Then down from the mountain the prairie spoke:

Dear, sweet woman,

her voice that rose with lavender,

you are mistaken.

 

And then she gave to me the madness of birds

—all of them—

they dart before the afternoon rains, and they are pendulums through

the sky when monsoons bounce above the ground.

They spin their heads with brightness and warbling and unpeel the skin of

nature forgotten.

She gave me the Jays in the willows and the Killdeer along lakes and rivers—

the Killdeer–

who jump through irrigation ditches with pecking, poking beaks; too quick on

the shell of a Snapping Turtle and too fast along a blade of grass to make it

move.

She gave me the Lark Bunting’s plateaued nest and unspoiled white down; the

prairie notes of a Red-winged blackbird.

She gave me their wings—brilliant colonies and communities of airborne

partners unending and saturating that same space in my belly;

mocking my incertitude

through their flight.

He thinks he’s lost me in the store.

Mad because he can’t find his matchbox car; (the one I told him not to bring because history has a way of repeating itself with five-year-olds),

he hides behind the rack of Hallmark Cards and then wanders farther. He doesn’t know I am watching him.

But I am.

And when he comes back to me, his head is down and the disappearing fullness of his cheeks peek out from above his neck.

He lost his baby fat somewhere between the parked car and the aisle of perennials.

I reach for his hand and guide him toward the Evergreens; the little ones that can be pruned and shaped when planted in a container.

His fingers pull away from mine to touch their prickly texture and we pick two; their green is vibrant and otherworldly when we load them into the truck.

Everyone likes our trees he says, and he must be right:

the shoppers who push their empty carts back through the parking lot smile at his proud, dirt-smudged  face as his nose brushes the scent of sapling promise.

When we are home, we go about the business of moving the eager trees into their bereft planters, and the little big boy at my side starts to talk.

Don’t be scared, he pets their temporarily faded branches;

Hurry mom, he insists, touching the first tree like a favored cat.

You’ll like your new home, he whispers into their upward stems while dirt is poured.

Then the second tree into the empty planter: both are dually satisfied and his talk more confident this time.

It’s okay tree, his singsong words are a poem caroled across the yard when he runs to retrieve the watering can and then the open mouth of the long hose.

When the two meet, a feathery spray of water dampens my clothes and we laugh.

I’ve grabbed the pruning shears by now,

and I even out just few branches on each tree before we set them in the sun

so the little gardener can pour the arching stream of water into their roots.

 

Today I stood underneath the belly of a goose,

its feathers formed the perfect intersection of down

from each side of a soft, plump paunch.

 

Then past my arched neck and over the road,

the falter of a bent wing threw the bird off balance

and I caught my breath for the goose and for the car below.

 

But then its flight amended towards the greater air,

and my fingers unfastened from a tight, frozen clutch

wondering at palms that know how to merge

sometimes without cognitive consent.

 

And when we have tilted sideways on uncorrected wing—

when we are bent in half by the unexplained

and move quickly towards the asphalt,

or watch the perfect spine of others try and correct their flight,

 

somehow the faces of our furrowed hands know to come together

and mouth the words that have always been there

for us, and from the vastness of sky

 

Remember how we left the kitchen warm

to high-step through the falling snow;

the call from school coming hours ago.

 

How we knew that fine red line would form on our shins where the boots rubbed,

but still we floated through that feathery, sallow sand

to meet the neighbor-boy who hiked a mile up the hill

with his eyelashes stuck together

and his joyous face chapped and numb with exultant cold.

 

Spirits of the dead soared and sunk repeatedly

when we built the network of tunneled snow

from which to hide and then fly through the air on our sleds;

adrenalin and joy stronger than hunger.

 

Yet a lunch deferred awaited us in the kitchen,

like childhood revisits the adult;

hot chocolate and tomato soup lingered on the table for discovery,

grilled cheese expecting to thaw our mouths.

 

Then banana bread of course,

before we were obliged to send the neighbor-boy back down the hill

ahead of the early darkness.

Where he would see in the fading light

a pair of barn owls splitting the air silently above his head

 

and those frozen stars of white

would cling to our names forever.