How to Incorporate a Town

Against the stain of heat 

lightning that cracks a fresco 

of Oklahoma dusk, add

this husk of breath. The lawn

a skeletal color. Any remembrance 

of robin’s egg blue, or born-

again vermillion along the myrtle 

leaf, has sunk into seasonal

fable. Arkansas river mud

an odd Valhalla of frogs. An endless 

scrim of small towns along the Indian 

Turnpike. Guess, if you can,

the name of this opera with an empty 

libretto. What can be said against

the stain of mass relocation

that hasn’t been said by simply weeping?

What phantasmal wheat 

makes the bread ghosts eat?

Slim vials of rain arrive

at a place where the plains end

their protest of dust, where 

the late birthmark of Art Deco 

architecture has grown, where 

Osage hills assuage Ozark

Mountains, where the Wild Bunch 

and Daltons gunned a hole in history,

where oil transubstantiates. Add to that rain 

whatever dignity stains. Wouldn’t you

know, metaphor is the usual method 

of incorporating a town. Colonial 

becomes normative, becomes Norman, 

Oklahoma, becomes a University,

becomes a universal land grant, 

becomes a honeycomb of dead bees

in the apiary of America. Our magnum 

reginae is a coin over each eye.