Water that moves, in a bodylike stream,
through its cool channels fills the warm prairie’s dream.
Waking to tend it, the grass-moving sky

pours with grasses.  Big Bluestem’s drinking roots lie
nine feet down the waving, remembering sod
they have swum through, to feed on, to build.  When it swings
like a wing in small flight, when it sways,
turkey feet murmur, red three-toed feet sing.

Little Bluestem, as copper as autumn or clay,
floating seeds past the prairie’s dense, watery hand
till they shimmer to columns, wet smoke on the land;

Indian Grass, lapping up the spattering sun;
prairies step slower than palaces, down
under the teeming roof of the ground,
quiet as animals.  Then, when they rise,
prairies, like palaces, loom, and surprise.

First collected in Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003, second edition with CD, 2008).