All You See Is Grass
The discovery, of course,
never finished:
the milkweed, the current, the glint
of red in grass
when light lengthens
over hillsides
and then, with a shudder,
goes out.
Here, the birdsong, There the bones—
The plow with all the rest of the rust.
Old hands finger threads
of memories
buried somewhere
in the grass:
This dugout, That homestead,
But all you see
is grass.
Encounter
Morning arrives
blanketed in snow.
Unbidden, I wake to see
small clouds of breath
erupt from the nose
of a deer— I assume
his eyelashes
are coated in ice.
We take these victories
of life
in stride,
move our feet
through the snow,
marvel at the bulkiness
of our tracks
compared to the sharp perfect
punctures of the deer’s
in the new snow—
Pour the coffee,
begin.
The Grass was the country as Water is the sea.
-Willa Cather
Rediscovering the Great American Prairie 