You’re in Kansas now. Slow black birds
fly down at night and disappear into fields
of hay. Other people have barns, but the small
rambler you live in has been rolled over with
so much paint that your cupboards don’t close
and walls seem round in the middle. You eat soup.
You eat cans and cans of soup. You each so much
soup that the taste reminds you of combines and your
rambler’s wood, scuffed-up floor. The world is flat
and made of three things. (What they are can change,
but they’re always three.) For work you do something
with grain or teach kids in suspenders. The two have
never been that dissimilar to your mind. When you
walk home nothing is more important than brown
leather shoes, that feel. Walking further you remember
how your father told you that these fields were of gold.
You thought he meant it about money, but now you’re
more sure. You think about that, you think about that
and smile when the wind bends grass around your
brown leather shoes.