Tracings

The women were divided between regrets for the homes they had left and fear of the deserts and savages before them. —Francis Parkman nothing but this continent intent on its dismay— hands, etc. bandaged, a torn petticoat fringed with lace, roseate frozen fingers, or elsewhere feet wrapped in burlap scuffing new snow after the indigo of their tunics seeps back into the soil this spring, the several springs’ dulling thaw and incidental greenery what marks they made were harrowed out by those who settled, so set themselves against the land whether to keep the land open to passage or parcel it to the plow Benton and Everett argued “English tartars,” some said, white savages to plunder the trade, “only farmer and tradesman stabilize” his head raised slightly the dying woodsman views the open plains, “flat water” squalls spilling stiff grasses into the small shade a stand of scrub trees gives his end “huge skulls and whitening bones of buffalo were scattered everywhere” the Conestoga’s canvas straining to the wind, the plow’s first bite, the first indenture of the rutted road, crossties set down, oil, asphalt glittering quartz aggregate to the sun the harrow’s bright discs crumble the damp shine of the new furrow, the wind dulls and sifts grassland into dust two days in the storm cellar, wet rags to their faces, the slatted door impacted with wet rags, dowery linens strange light at the cyclone’s onset, a cupped brightness edging banks of dark clouds, fields darkening in lines of gathering dust, section on section spilling eastward, a straw drilled through a tree, a team of mules transported forty miles intact a dream of transport, Dorothy soaring on the wind, becalmed in still another summer, lost, follows billboards and Burma Shave into the city’s ragged sprawl Uptown or Lakeview, five children in three rooms, A.D.C., weathers like unpainted wood, stacked porches where her laundry tatters with city grit, bars haunted by banjo music everybody talks of home as though it were the sparkle of an earlier dream, a glint of rainwater in someone’s hair, names you can’t remember, old photographs gone brown with age, a man and woman, faces obscured by broad hats, a bare tree beside them, the bare distances empty and faded into the sky Oxus, Phasis, Palmyra— Oz encased in glass, “variegated with fields and meadows” store window dioramas display the life and manners of high-rise glass apartments— The El Dorado, Malibu East— warm winters, cool summers high above the city’s noise clouds move in facets across their polished faces, tipped red at sunset, presiding over a close-set clutter of flat, graveled roofs graceful as mannequins they are laughing into the summer evening, women bright as spring flowers, in autumn’s colors, warmed and smiling, they talk of love before a dying fire gray as she is, aging, she fingers the pictures of ladies’ magazines, fingers, as well, pictures she brought from home the red flowers on the floor wear into black treads, black dust comes in at her windows his weapons arranged at his side, the sun darkening his sight, Cooper contrived his death in alien spaces; Boone finished his days on a crumbling porch that fronted on the open West