Voices from Kansas

The women of Wichita say they live in what
is casually known on both coasts as a flyover state.
The prairie wind here is constant in every season.
Sometimes it makes the sucking sound of ocean.
Sometimes it moans like an animal in heat.

In April, deliberate fires blacken great swatches
of cropland. Scarves of smoke darken the day
devouring briars and thistles and climbing vetches
before seedtime. Tractors draw threads to the edge of sky.
You learn to pull out and pass, say the Wichita women

whom distance has not flattened, who cruise at a cool
80 miles per hour toward the rolling-pin horizon
where oncoming headlights are visible more than a mile
away. Long hours at a stretch behind the wheel
they zoom up to Michigan to speak at a conference,

revisit a lover, drop in on old friends.
They will not be sequestered by space. Jo-El,
descended from Socialists, is saving the farm—
labor songs of her forebears, accompanied by dulcimer.
Lynn collects early photos of sodhouse homesteaders.

Mary Anne has got a sad history in her arms.
She is reconstructing her orphaned grandfather
in his sea of sheep, white blobs overspreading the plains,
his whole Scottish clan, ten siblings carried off together
in December of 1918 by a wildfire flu.
This tear-stained boy in the woolly fold, custodian
of his flock and her life, shines piercingly through.
As the grassland is rooted, so too are the Wichita women.
No absence among them may go unmarked into sleep.
Like wind in the wheat, the boundary blurs but keeps.