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

Driving in Oklahoma

    

On humming rubber along this white concrete,
lighthearted between the gravities
of source and destination like a man
halfway to the moon
in this bubble of tuneless whistling
at seventy miles an hour from the windvents,
over prairie swells rising
and falling, over the quick offramp
that drops to its underpass and the truck
thundering beneath as I cross
with the country music twanging out my windows,
I’m grooving down this highway feeling
technology is freedom’s other name when
—a meadowlark
comes sailing across my windshield
with breast shining yellow
and five notes pierce
the windroar like a flash
of nectar on mind,
gone as the country music swells up and drops
                         me wheeling down
           my notch of cement-bottomed sky
                        between home and away
and wanting
to move again through country that a bird
has defined wholly with song,
and maybe next time see how

                          he flies so easy, when he sings.

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

Leaving Tulsa

for Cosetta 

Once there were coyotes, cardinals 
in the cedar. You could cure amnesia 
with the trees of our back-forty. Once 
I drowned in a monsoon of frogs— 
Grandma said it was a good thing, a promise 
for a good crop. Grandma’s perfect tomatoes. 
Squash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing, 
never spoke about her childhood 
or the faces in gingerbread tins 
stacked in the closet. 

She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way. 
But I don’t know this kind of burial: 
vanishing toads, thinning pecan groves, 
peach trees choked by palms. 
New neighbors tossing clipped grass 
over our fence line, griping to the city 
of our overgrown fields. 

Grandma fell in love with a truck driver, 
grew watermelons by the pond 
on our Indian allotment, 
took us fishing for dragonflies. 
When the bulldozers came 
with their documents from the city
and a truckload of pipelines, 
her shotgun was already loaded. 

Under the bent chestnut, the well 
where Cosetta’s husband 
hid his whiskey—buried beneath roots 
her bundle of beads. They tell 
the story of our family. Cosetta’s land 
flattened to a parking lot. 

Grandma potted a cedar sapling 
I could take on the road for luck. 
She used the bark for heart lesions 
doctors couldn’t explain. 
To her they were maps, traces of home, 
the Milky Way, where she’s going, she said. 

After the funeral
I stowed her jewelry in the ground, 
promised to return when the rivers rose. 

On the grassy plain behind the house 
one buffalo remains. 

Along the highway’s gravel pits 
sunflowers stand in dense rows. 
Telephone poles crook into the layered sky. 
A crow’s beak broken by a windmill’s blade. 
It is then I understand my grandmother: 
When they see open land 
they only know to take it.

I understand how to walk among hay bales 
looking for turtle shells. 
How to sing over the groan of the county road 
widening to four lanes. 
I understand how to keep from looking up: 
small planes trail overhead 
as I kneel in the Johnson grass 
combing away footprints. 

Up here, parallel to the median 
with a vista of mesas’ weavings, 
the sky a belt of blue and white beadwork, 
I see our hundred and sixty acres 
stamped on God’s forsaken country, 
a roof blown off a shed, 
beams bent like matchsticks, 
a drove of white cows 
making their home 
in a derailed train car.

--Jennifer Elise Foerster, poet, member of the Muskogee (Creek Nation) from Leaving Tulsa, 2013


Photo: With my grandma "One Granny" approximately 1970