General, I am again without my wagons in Iowa.
Today I thought to drive the truck,
for I have been bad to the old girl,
and took her out to the lake
for breakfast with the ranks of duck.

But I hadn't any luck unshaking you.
Your ghost still comes upon my rearview mirror
in a fog, out of touch and distant: a genetic habit
that instinctually corrects the wheel.

But something even more unreal,
a marble man – a general
out of the terrible past, an iconoclast
in practice, but not the prairie's last.

Your forms make rogue demands
upon my precious time.
Your honking drives a story
down the staircase of my spine.

And I can see you on the misty banks.
A swan, but not unlike the man.
In the distance where the meadows
sink upon your lonely wharf
you dispatch docile flocks
with the pond up to your socks
against the willows in the shadowed brush
who weep upon your freezing rocks.

Forget my birth for it is longing
that alarms the tribe.
Your tenured trumpeters of value
arouse the diatribe on missing wives.

Old man, I haven't ample lives
to mount the question,
why cobs are happy to elope
when the nest is tested.

The pond and most esteemed delusions will suffice
and you shall rule them in your muddy boots
with ducks that heed your avaricious life.

I tell you this, for in the darkness
I could see the feathers morph
into my patriarch of seven country roads,
a pond, unto himself, adorned with ancient boats.

I cut the engine off to speak with you in time,
beside the little lake where I bivouacked in the pines.
Alone inside the moment of your breath,
I hoped that I would beat you to my death,
and sat a while whilst the gaggle
mounted questions in the air.
Strange they should not answer,
though they lingered with my prayer.