Indian Summer

There’s a farm auction up the road.
Wind has its bid in for the leaves.
Already bugs flurry the headlights
between cornfields at night.
If this world were permanent,
I could dance full as the squaw dress
on the clothesline.
I would not see winter
in the square of white yard-light on the wall.
But something tugs at me.
The world is at a loss and I am part of it
migrating daily.
Everything is up for grabs
like a box of farm tools broken open.
I hear the spirits often in the garden
and along the shore of corn.
I know this place is not mine.
I hear them up the road again.
This world is a horizon, an open sea.
Behind the house, the white iceberg of the barn.

--Diane Glancy (1941- ), Cherokee American poet

Old Prairie House Between Tulsa and Bartlesville on US 75

I

Back in time
car in yard
shutters at windows
paint on gray boards
old man, old woman
their children gone
then man and woman younger
with young children
west wing not yet built on house
one wagon, horse arrive
untended land
back too far
young man, woman with eyes
like bright baubles
holding space
one shutter closes on another.


II

Grizzled, unpossessed
on the ledge of plains
factional roof
meager walls written upon
like points of long prairie grass
the house stares across the highway
as though remembering a fir tree
carried on horseback
through blinding snow.


III

Survival of facade
when content does not endure
one part has nothing to do with the others
all is hollow
ramshackled
but house still stands on prairie
customs still leap on points
of delicate prairie grass
where the bright bauble of the eye
blinked once too often.

--Diane Glancy (1941- ), Cherokee American poet, from One Age in a Dream, 1986.