Prairie Queen
The day is already hot when we begin walking and the wind comes in warmer and more humid with each invisible wave that creates the shuddering ripple of uncut grass, the nictitating Morse of caught rubbish. We will signal back in the language of smoke. You can see further now than in a month or two, when the tall grasses come into their own, and the prairie turns rainbow with coneflower, thistle, chicory, aster and goldenrod. Go three hundred years in any direction you care to name, and look as far as you like and see nothing but forest. When you turn over a coyote skull, the thick white web of a black widow spider lurks in the left forebrain cavity. That silk is harvested, carefully, for the crosshairs of gunsights. Someday soon the air will turn yellow as pollen and darken with the threat of tornadoes; after the rain, small lavender butterflies will crystallize on the edge of each evanescent puddle. Their wings breathe and no one knows where they go. If I leave the path with you and lie down and do not move, the grasses are already tall enough to conceal me until winter comes and strips everything down to its skeletal truths. By then I will have sunk far into the past where, from the hollow of a bison scapula, I lap scopolamine tea. When they ask, you have never known me.
©2000 F.J. Bergmann"Prairie Queen" appeared in Big Toe Review