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Erosion’s slowly changing dirty sentries— bluffs, buttes, grasslands,
hills, ledges, plunging
drops. . The Little Missouri River’s trickling orogeny, permeable
sand’s rilled topography best viewed
from above. . Chert’s cryptocrystalline quartz’s interlocking grains
a golden eagle’s circles
measure the earth
over. . Grasshoppers’ popcorn detonation
wings in snaps
papercut, their apricot
legs’ ridiculous backward hinges. . Days
of endless smokescreening
haze. . Some western birds A Say’s phoebe’s saffron buff.
Prairie falcons in scissoring stoops, purposeful
circuits. Ferruginous hawks’
full-frontal flash, ridge
of tawny speckling on the outspread wings.
Flocks of lark sparrows in explosive flashes—their
handsome heads when they’ve paused. . Wild horses have
names: Starlight
Blaze
Cloud
Ghost
Bandit
and Buffaloberry. Wild horses. Wild
horses. Wild wild
horses. . Fracking’s cryptic personless economies
but for truckers’ barrelling tactics
over all the well-groomed gravel roads—. All the derricks’ daylong dipping.
All the burnfires’ nightlong gusting.
All the frantic farflung drilling. Dark Satanic prairie gasfields. . That Baird sparrow’s
on-the-ground grammar of foraging
in the cottonwood’s shade, the sonagrammic chip of its call
more semi-colon
than verb in the ammodramus spell
its little life
was weaving. . Each hike’s uncurling duration binoculars expand the particulars
of— prairie falcon
funnel of cloud
cliffsides dusted in bicarbonated shadow
blaze of trail
petrified obsolescences
parking lot . flash and filter all aglitter |
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