Adrift in America with a good car for company,
they drive through that unstruck set that matches
the look of the way we are today:

that mailbox shape, that boot on a fencepost,
those telephone poles, their posture and stance,
that haystack's profile, those fast-food arches,
the signage, windmills, grain elevators,
the barbed-wire embrace of litter and road-kill.

Granted the Greeks might say the same,
the life of a people impresses the land,
and palpable time pares itself down
until landscape alone can almost say it:
like these four seconds from a two-hour movie--
only a long shot of an XJ at twilight
on a rural road, no music dubbed,
the camera unmoving--yet how this place
trapped for a moment in celluloid amber
independently resonates
until I, who cannot close my eyes
and count the steps to my own front porch
can number the timeless frames shown there.

It may be the motion, how the car esses,
smoothly apexing the double chicane
around that pair of silos, impressing
upon the body the sudden weight
of prairie sinuosity.

Perhaps it's the silence of a wind
that once was laden with the grief
of Lakota flutes and those older upheavals
that undid the world of dinosaurs
and drained those ancient inland oceans.

But what stays is that heaviness of light,
that only constant our time knows,
the daily dimming that since creation
has thickened the evening air until,
like a dusk applied by a palette knife,
it stirs in the smoke of long-quenched campfires
the dust of uncounted buffalo
in whose shadow the cornstalks sway like kelp
beneath the shallow seas of Nebraska.