This is a strange place; roads in long, straight lines,
hay in giant blanket rolls; like a dream,
blowing steadily, even with no sign
but the mill's horizontal plume of steam
gray white on a blue gray sky, the wind, which
blows even indoors and never stops. Cold,
whose gradient crosses the wind's, whose pitch
is higher, sharper, steadier, unfolds
in deeper rolling waves. Shivering swine
in roadside lean-to's; in the fields' straight seams,
thin, brown, brittle trees, down in the creek's ditch,
tufting the rise, anywhere they can hold
against winter's high plains jeremiad,
that mournful windsong that drove settlers
mad.
Copyright © 2011. William John Watkins. All rights reserved.