These poems were written for song a cycle in 2008, Prairie Girl. I wrote about my life as a child growing up in a rural county of Kansas sixteen miles from the Colorado border and twenty from Oklahoma. Poem V will be posted next week, and Poems VI and VII the following week
III. High Noon on the Prairie
Luminous vapors of gasoline
ascend on waves of heat.
A crow caws from the tree-threatened roof.
Parched earth stretches into eternity,
a maze of cracks.
Water dripped from a tin can
bounces off an over-baked surface.
Riverlets scurry crookedly to each crevice,
lured into earth’s center.
How easy it is to escape
if you are water.
IV. Playing Grown-Up
Two o’clock!
Throw open the screen door
One, Two, Three, Four, Fiiiiiive!
Slam! Blam!
Grandpa’s naptime,
two to four.
Mind the store.
The radio high overhead, crackles:
“The hourly news at five after the hour.
Sports! News! Livestock reports!”
News again?
Bo-o-o-o-ring!
Sawed-off chair to the freezer,
shinny up, reach high above.
Twirl the staticy knob.
Cheatin’ hearts
or talk, talk, talk!
How does a heart cheat?
Does it beat too fast?
Too slow?
Slide back down the freezer
and settle in to read.
Dennis the Menace, Blondie, Andy Capp
Zane Grey, or Mickey Spillane.
Cash register!
Ca-ching! Ca-ching! Numbers flying,
Coins plunked in the drawer.
Plunk! Into the drawer.
Plunk! Into the drawer.
Two thirty p.m.
. . . thirty-five
. . . forty
. . . forty-five.