Entering Kansas
Enter the dust devils, the dervish grasses,
prairie schooners creeping in their ruts.
Enter sod busters and ploughshares,
settlers in dugouts raving in the wind,
John Brown in a God-rage,
Bible in one hand, rifle in another,
bleak whitewashed farmhouses
blinding in August light.
awl, adze, hoe, axe, and maul,
reaper, thresher, harrow,
stone boat, corn crib, farrow pen,
slop barrel, pitch fork, hay rack, ice hook.
Egg bulge in a black snake's neck.
Sky filled with wisps of Judgment Day trumpets,
cicadas prophesying drought,
hedge balls, sand burrs, thistle down,
cedars shivering in greatcoats dusted with snow,
buffalo wallow, arrowhead.
Shoat, boar, anvil, tong,
bullheads hanging from a trot line,
coyote pelt stretched on a fence,
bob-white whistle, cuckoo chuckle,
dickcissle's chew-chew-chew.
Mocking bird and copperhead,
lambsquarter, morning glory, curly dock,
dead fall and sheep-eating dogs.
Enter the thousand acre Griefmaker,
Chief Blue Jacket, enter the dog star,
black Nicodemus and Haldeman-Julius,
Beecher Bible and Rifle Church.
Acansis, Konzas, Ukasa.
Santa Fe and Union Pacific
braying in the bottoms,
townships, metes and bounds,
rain-worn gravemarkers
and organ pipe columns
of grain elevators washed in moonlight
beyond the deserted towns.
