Prairie Sure

Would I miss the way a breeze dimples the butter-colored curtains on Sunday mornings, or nights gnashed by cicadas and thunderstorms? The leaning gossip, the half-alive ripple of sunflowers, sagging eternities of corn and sorghum, September preaching yellow, yellow in all directions, the windowsills swelling with Mason jars, the blue sky bluest borne through tinted glass above the milled grains? The dust, the heat, distrusted, the screen door slapping as the slat-backed porch swing sighs, the hatch of houseflies, the furlongs of freight trains, and how they sing this routine, so sure, so sure— the rote grace of every tempered life?