#1
The city, which we loved
for a time, is behind us now,
paraphrased in the mind.
You take snapshots
of fields and farms
and unbroken vistas, aiming
to frame a new experience,
here in a land called “country.”
We are heading west
to yet another somewhere,
and have stepped out of worry
into quiet amazement
at how the prairie world
billows so easily
without the slightest
need for us.
#2
Remember that night?
The two of us. Beer in hand.
The boasting.
With no sense of how to live.
We were determined to break free,
as if we understood freedom.
So we left all of it —
family, friends, pavement,
streetlights, the daily hustle
in the crosswalk world —
for treelessness
upon treelessness.
Fields and hills.
The will of incessant wind.
A ribbon of road running.
Rain and thunder.
A sudden wall of mountains
and sky sky sky.
You stare out
the car window at Montana
and quietly cry.
Eventually, you stop.
#3
As if this country
were one country,
as if ocean people could trade
dunes and salt spray
for rooted resistance,
sea for grass.
We tried.
We listened long
to the way the grass
sings in the night.
No one here
really likes us.
We are hungry again.
Our wallets thin.
The rain
angling sideways
hurts.
Now what?
