In Oklahoma

When you leave a Real City, as Gertrude Stein did, and go to 

Oakland, as she did, you can say, as she did, there is no there, there. 

When you are a Hartford insurance executive, as Wallace Stevens was, 

and you have never been to Oklahoma, as he had not, you can invent 

people to dance there, as he did, and you can name them Bonnie and 

Josie. But a THERE depends on how, in the beginning, the wind 

breathes upon its surface. Shh: amethyst, sapphire. Lead. Crystal 

mirror. See, a cow-pond in Oklahoma. Under willows now, so the 

Osage man fishing there is in the shade. A bobwhite whistles from his 

fencepost, a hundred yards south of the pond. A muskrat-head draws 

a nest of Vs up to the pond’s apex, loses them there in the reeds and 

sedges where a redwing blackbird, with gold and scarlet epaulets 

flashing, perches on the jiggly buttonwood branch. Purple martins 

skim the pond, dip and sip, veer and swoop, check, pounce, crisscross 

each other’s flashing paths. His wife in the Indian Hospital with 

cancer. Children in various unhappiness. White clouds sail slowly 

across the pure blue pond. Turtles poke their heads up, watch the 

Indian man casting, reeling, casting, reeling. A bass strikes, is hooked, 

fights, is reeled in, pulls away again, is drawn back, dragged ashore,

 put on the stringer. In Oklahoma, Wally, here is Josie’s father. 

Something that is going to be nothing, but isn’t. Watch: now he takes 

the bass home, cleans and fries it. Shall I tell you a secret, Gert? 

You have to be there before it’s there. Daddy, would you pass them a plate 

of fish? See friends, it’s not a flyover here. Come down from your 

planes and you’ll understand. Here.

--- Carter Revard (1931- 2022), poet, writer, Rhodes scholarship recipient, English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, medievalist, and member of the Osage nation