Kansas Portrait      Summer, 2004

How do you capture it?
the feeling of a place?

In a poem
             A picture
                          a documentary
NEVER

Convey the distant rumble of a coming storm
The Smell of dry breezeless day

Wind, wind and more wind

Grass on rolling hills like the waves of the sea
Golden fields of wheat under a sky so endless, you think of infinity

Scarlet sunsets, the creak of an old windmill

            THE MEADOWLARKS SONG
Roy says she will love up on you one minute and the next give you a good spanking

It's numberless unmarked graves
Primitives and pioneers side by side giving electromagnetic pulses
Enriching the land for the next sojourner

I want to caress the gently curves, run barefoot in the buffalo grass
Swim naked in Wilson Lake
Make love and wake up to the Jays shrill call

In a country where there are too many laws and too little lov'in
It's nice to find a place
                  where you wave at everyone on the road
                  listen to old people tell stories
                  dance in the kitchen
                  check the rain gauge in the morning
This is the center of the earth
We measure it all from here
Where everyone seems to be from
But no one goes back

It's counties whose population reached their crescendo eighty years ago
Now blinking out like fireflies
The wind whispers the final stanza thru old screen windows of
    schools, churches, banks and houses long abandoned

But it's the darkness after the heat lightning show
the locust winding down
between the coyote wails

It's the stars piercing the the blackness
Acutely shedding their knowing light

The only ones to remember what was
the only ones that will see what's to come

I DREAM UNDER THEM