O, Bury Me Not

Sunset red stains the plains
like Quantrill days in bloody Lawrence .
A kestrel arcs overhead, but he has not
one red feather.

On either side of the highway,
country miles filled end to end
in feed corn, alfalfa, and soy;
acres gone mostly to graze,
jelly rolls of hay for riderless mares,
the odd pasture of amber-eyed emus.
Humming alpaca songs supplant the cicadas
shaggy necks listing for lost Inca valleys,

as the Flint Hills shift uneasy beneath
dun-colored cows, and mourn again
the jumps, the round-em-up’s,
the Big .50’s.

And engines still bluster and railroad
through spitdirt towns with odd names
like La Cygne and Chetopa and Kismet.
Their founders never suspected one day
they’d be tucking up rusting trailer parks
and struggling co-ops.

Dead oil pumps stand like dewinged grasshoppers
in fields of tall dropseed. Their hind legs,
useless, flutter no more. Their outlines go to brown
in the fading light like bark-stuck locust shells
on cottonwood trunks.

O, bury me not
on horizon land, where I’d fear
prairie dogs tunneling boneyards.
Encroaching night, black pan
with its sieve of stars. Moonrise, a pale palm raised,
gray as riverbed shale where the copperhead glides, or
a dead man’s hand played five years out of Abilene.

See the red sash tied at his waist,
and dread the possibility of no sunrise.

Aces over eights.
Hang up your shovel and we’ll strike out west,
beyond the great yonder: El Dorado , Dodge, Salina ,
and with wishes even for our enemies, we’ll wander
until we reach that farther shore.