Kasey Jueds

Limestone, Shale, Flint

What called out to me then: meadowlark fervent
on fence-wire, the train whistle’s long

relinquishing. Landlocked, with the narrow creek
for company, its headlong glitter

and going. Humped shapes of bison
trundled calm as saints, bending to the necessary

grasses, while on the other side of fence
I bent to all the names I didn’t know, the wind-chastened flowers

mauve and pink and blue: I searched their petals
inside my book, then the manifold

ground. Sunburned, that first day: fingertips pressed
against my forearms called up colorless moons,

phantom planets briefly visible before the scarlet
flooded back. All around, the fields in flood, water where it shouldn’t

bide. Grasses silvered in the afterworld
of storm. Grasses lucid with almost. The prairie

of them an ocean, once, built
from what the water left: limestone, shale,

the flint that stayed to name those hills,
too unyielding for tractors to tame. Roots

of bluestem constantly turn the earth, net themselves
under every taken step, every passage

imagined or true. Blanketed, people say
of grassland gone, the miles of continent

it covered once, swaddling the planet as if it were child. 
Comfort me: I peered through an abandoned

farmhouse window, rippled glass
giving onto the shadowed bulk of chairs, an open door

leading from that room to some deeper dim
beyond. Foxed mirrors offered outlines

of the ghosts I half-believed in, and I turned back
toward the animals I couldn’t see: the elusive

foxes, and the rabbits grass-sheltered, safe for a moment
in the day’s flash and shine. There was a safety

in the switch grass I touched, the wild rye: all afternoon
my hand closed gently over seedheads, then let go

as silence shifted in the gone
train’s wake. Empty space between

blades of grass: what the wind loves. What I loved
was something distant, and something very

close, and I knew their names were the same. I thought
cleave, that old-fashioned word, I asked silos

on the horizon to remind me. I drove away
between flooded fields, where water

which had nowhere else to go
gathered itself and shone.

Back to Issue XI…