Jeffrey Woodward: NEBRASKA

a bare tree
and then, again,
the Great Plains

opening before you as if set into place checked and double-checked with a master carpenter’s level so nearly exact as to render literal that old saw about mountain and molehill frost over first light unwinding a never-ending scroll of sky a wind to whittle cloud after cloud away if not the stench of pig trough pig pen another village interrupting the prickly monotony of corn stubble another village with a water tower’s polished introduction and then again corn stubble a patchwork of brown of gray

remembering
its roots in the sky—
a bare tree

.

.

by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Frogpond 31:2, Spring/Summer 2008