Tracings

The women were divided between regrets for the homes they had left and fear of the deserts and savages before them.
—Francis Parkman

nothing but this continent

intent on its dismay—

hands, etc. bandaged,

a torn petticoat fringed

with lace, roseate frozen

fingers, or elsewhere

feet wrapped in burlap

scuffing new snow

after the indigo of their tunics

seeps back into the soil

this spring, the several springs’

dulling thaw and incidental greenery

what marks they made were

harrowed out by those who settled,

so set themselves against the land

whether to keep the land

open to passage

or parcel it to the plow

Benton and Everett argued

“English tartars,” some said,

white savages to plunder the trade,

“only farmer and tradesman stabilize”

his head raised slightly

the dying woodsman

views the open plains,

“flat water” squalls

spilling stiff grasses

into the small shade a stand

of scrub trees gives his end

“huge skulls and whitening

bones of buffalo

were scattered everywhere”

the Conestoga’s canvas

straining to the wind,

the plow’s first bite,

the first indenture

of the rutted road,

crossties set down,

oil, asphalt glittering

quartz aggregate to the sun

the harrow’s bright discs

crumble the damp shine

of the new furrow,

the wind dulls and sifts

grassland into dust

two days in the storm cellar,

wet rags to their faces,

the slatted door impacted

with wet rags, dowery linens

strange light at the cyclone’s

onset, a cupped brightness

edging banks of dark clouds,

fields darkening in lines

of gathering dust, section

on section spilling eastward,

a straw drilled through a tree,

a team of mules transported

forty miles intact

a dream of transport, Dorothy

soaring on the wind, becalmed

in still another summer, lost,

follows billboards and Burma Shave

into the city’s ragged sprawl

Uptown or Lakeview, five

children in three rooms, A.D.C.,

weathers like unpainted wood,

stacked porches where her laundry

tatters with city grit, bars

haunted by banjo music

everybody talks of home

as though it were the sparkle

of an earlier dream, a glint

of rainwater in someone’s hair,

names you can’t remember,

old photographs gone brown

with age, a man and woman,

faces obscured by broad hats,

a bare tree beside them,

the bare distances empty

and faded into the sky

Oxus, Phasis, Palmyra—

Oz encased in glass,

“variegated with fields and meadows”

store window dioramas

display the life and manners

of high-rise glass apartments—

The El Dorado, Malibu East—

warm winters, cool summers

high above the city’s noise

clouds move in facets

across their polished faces,

tipped red at sunset, presiding

over a close-set clutter

of flat, graveled roofs

graceful as mannequins

they are laughing into

the summer evening, women

bright as spring flowers,

in autumn’s colors,

warmed and smiling,

they talk of love

before a dying fire

gray as she is, aging,

she fingers the pictures

of ladies’ magazines,

fingers, as well, pictures

she brought from home

the red flowers on the floor

wear into black treads, black

dust comes in at her windows

his weapons arranged at his side,

the sun darkening his sight,

Cooper contrived his death

in alien spaces; Boone finished

his days on a crumbling porch

that fronted on the open West

Source: Selected Poems (1994)