1.

The red face of your submission. Can I imagine your grief? First to the French then to the Mexicans to the lost land the drift of the Loupe touching your face and shoulders.  Like a Pawnee there is no battle.  You concern yourself with the Apaches' revolt, with the horse which carried them to the desert. But there is no battle in you, instead of Nebraska you could just as easily give way to Kansas or Texas.  You would become a scout to the man who called your home his

P R O P E R T Y,

you would wear his hat and eat his rations, you would keep peace. You do not curse the land for failing or the dry riverbeds. You do not curse anyone's God or ask why.

2.

There is of course the cold. There are droughts within and an erosion brought on by the wind, there is a violence of choking dust.  There is the ache of flat land, never rising with the static of volcanic masses, no fissures, no peaks just the plains, just the fields just corn and cattle, just insects, just prosperity and ruin, and there is always the cold. There is the Nebraska shaped scar which raises the skin of my thighs.  There is this rectangle where my skin collapsed like a farmer undone by the gasping retreat of the Promised Land. There are the silent winters, there are the muddy waters, there is the illusion of moving west.

3.

Your body has a history; it is a museum of the things that broke you.  Crates full of depression era glass and photographs.  One of mother's with skin weathered and brown. One of sons lost  to the drought, lost in the famine, there is a delirious hunger there. A museum to the desperation of others. where is your mother? Gone looking for a route to the New World? Left for the promise that there is work beyond Omaha?  Did she call this land a trap and leave you here to make your own way? How far did you get before the dust covered her trail? That was a lost but the land will have it all before it's through.  That is your history and your future, you are a museum of failed salvation.

4.

But of course you aren't sand or drought or shards of shattered glass, you're a man. I have tried to rewrite with an epic knowledge that encompasses things that are thicker than skin.  What good did it do? Are you here again with skin so blank I could write red across your back with my nails? Will you surrender to me the sharp angles and soft pits and the cold, cold, soft....where I kissed skin stretched across your hp? You have moved away from me and there is no piece of you I can claim as mine.

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