Same scene, different season.

Cherries

In the minute it took
to fetch the blue bowl

from the kitchen
to pick the just-ripe

cherries, the blackbirds
had come. They picked

the branches clean, ascending
into their own blue bowl.

Lacking wings, I
look for meaning.

We were all hungry.
We were all fed.

-Andrea Cohen, 2012

My feelings about the prairies are mixed and I think well documented, but maybe not documented well here. The prairie, for me, is a foreign landscape--alien to the places where I grew up, where I learned what a landscape was. Everything's splayed out on the horizon. But lately I've been trying to get myself and my bike out to the Saskatoon city limits periodically. Once you break out of the suburbs you can trace big, square routes on the Range Roads, which are all gravel and nearly void of cars; my company is red-winged blackbirds, hawks, the occasional coot.

Today I got to a corner of dead ends where I didn't want to go further east but I couldn't go north or west, so I hauled my bike onto a tractor path that ran west along the power lines in hopes of hitting another road. Out in the pastures--out on the range, I guess--the world splits open and the prairies make sense. Their wildness is in their space, in the very openness of them, the fact that I can get on my bike in the center of Saskatoon, ride for thirty or forty minutes, and be left alone with the sky and the grass, the wind and the low hills. There's not another town for miles. There are just homesteads and range and perfectly straight dirt roads. I could lie down in an aspen grove while the world collapsed and rebuilt itself around me and never be the wiser.

There's a verse of 'Home on the Range' I didn't learn until recently: "How often at night when the heavens are bright with the light of the glittering stars / I stood there amazed and I asked as I gazed, does their glory exceed that of ours." The prairie abounds with reminders of your size, your smallness in a wide world. There are no small spaces, only vast expanses, and you can always, always see the sky.

The Totality of Facts

The laughing gull that flew behind the fencepost
and never came out was the beginning
and then a hand smaller than my hand covered Wisconsin
with a gesture for explanation.
In the afternoon there are pauses between the words
through which commas can grow like daisy fleabane.
A fish with an osprey in its back emerges from the Sound
and nothing can be learned by more analysis.
The book of her hair opens to its binding and I leaf through
the glorious pages of appreciation and that's not all.
We could not have turned fast enough to catch
light and leftovers from so much of what happened:
the swift figures behind you like a planet's dark
companion, ships entering and leaving the hall closet
the real and imagined between which is no difference.

-Allan Peterson, 2012

A Prayer That Will Be Answered

Lord let me suffer much
and then die

Let me walk through silence
and leave nothing behind not even fear

Make the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as before

Let the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in it

so that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his love

Make the day rise brightly
as if there were no more pain

And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee's head

-Anna Kamieńska

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

-Robert Frost, 1923

American Names

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Seine and Piave are silver spoons,
But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn,
There are English counties like hunting-tunes
Played on the keys of a postboy’s horn,
But I will remember where I was born.

I will remember Carquinez Straits,
Little French Lick and Lundy’s Lane,
The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates
And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane.
I will remember Skunktown Plain.

I will fall in love with a Salem tree
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea
And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart-Yard,
Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman’s Oast,
It is a magic ghost you guard
But I am sick for a newer ghost,
Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post.

Henry and John were never so
And Henry and John were always right?
Granted, but when it was time to go
And the tea and the laurels had stood all night,
Did they never watch for Nantucket Light?

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmédy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

-Stephen Vincent Benét, 1927

If I had a penny for every time someone asked me about differences between living in the U.S. and living in Canada...I'd have a few pennies, but, because Canada is phasing out pennies (just like my old pal New Zealand), they wouldn't be worth much on this side of the border. So that's one difference, right there. But it's a valid question, and as it's Canada Day--and we're coming up on the 4th of July--I figure I may as well take a stab at addressing it.