By Ryan Clark
for Warren, Oklahoma
1.
We tether to a bend
in a fork in a mud-
faced river. It is
much more complex
than this
course of trails
that drained us
through the past, this
loud gathering of
cows that has given us
this process for roots
as to
what living has
launched us here.
Our settlement grew
at the feet of granite
in a wildness of grasses
flattened hard
as a crossing.
Here are engines
we turn into a way
to make a home,
into a way to feel love
at the view of
really any fixed thing
when we are
away for as long
as it takes to see it
with the eyes
of return. We
place ourselves
at the road
where pass a wide
thread of cattle,
and we stay
to build when
the thread is cut.
2.
To be a product of the Great Plains
you must become a line with a series
of hooks holding you in the dirt.
The force you fear is the wind—
it isn’t history in the usual sense,
but it does pull you out and forget.
3.
Religion assures us as a sound heavy enough
to anchor a Warren uncrossed by the herds of the past.
We are a strong series of ties in a building fit to purpose.
We imagine the spirit entering the skin and talking.
What thing do we have as a way to hold each other
on the frontier except for this. The building of rooms
extends with the distance from isolation we are in prayer,
and these rooms are remade over years as signs of Warren’s existing.
For everyday that we are full we are a town that continues rising out of grasses.
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