Indiana from the highway, July

I find myself in agreement with Lowell:
Whitman’s shadow over us is far too generous.

but then falling from our seaboard, glissading
down to our great, indistinct flatlands,
his call becomes clearer, its grip tightening

there is an anonymous appeal of the
middle west, its homes such characterless
boxes of beige, and tan, colors without past,

suggesting places free of time, insular
and looking neither ahead or back,
perpetually in life’s unquestioning midst

the land itself is an answer to a query
that does not need to be asked: it has been
here, is here, and will ever be here, flat

undulations of droning green, stretched
long and thin, the whole visible world

And Whitman whispers like a zephyr
through the corn’s orderly, protestant rows;
this American ethos, the taut skinned man

too weary to shave, existentially bereft.
Work harder, son, he growls, tan to the
sagging bicep, pale as pearl beyond,

Work harder, he urges to himself, hidden
beneath the chaff, his fingers laved
of their prints, sanded by a lifetime of dirt

we pass through, but he has no time, nor mind
to peer down the road with us, to see
the lone curve of a state highway’s bridge,

gently ascending, surmounting the interstate,
breaking the horizon, sensual evidence
of humanity’s myth, monument to our passages.







Detachment

Think of our constructions, the pages
and girders, the combustion engines
and bright burning filaments, the silica
windows and the exploding tubes of plastic

All cultivated from this earth we scour
and traverse, piling on top of and digging
deep into her molten heart. Yet none of our
homes, or gadgets, or workplace wonders

resemble any element of the natural world.
No species but us has such intellect,
but none has strived so far to disassociate
itself with the very ground it still walks





Hair the color of sweet corn