Wisconsin


By new names
and then no names
at all, their laws
will reach your land,

Lorine, to feed
on your much loved
marshy spaces
whose occasional faces

discern a stranger
from far off
but like to take
a break from well

or welding just
to talk. We can-
not extricate
a place from those

it’s made of, the sounds
it makes. But now
from Blackhawk
Island to Madison

to Washington,
geologies
thin; more things
sound or work

the same. Their laws
will reach your land,
Lorine, by new names
then no names at all.
Source: Poetry (April 2012)