Cross-Kansas road home, marked
by stretches of heather
and skeletal shelter belts; winter
on the prairie, and I'm driving
that gray band, I-35, up.

Hawks rise from roadside posts, hover,
talons out, cut air, and the I-70
pumpjacks supplicate, bend and pray
to a grey sky that stretches
endless, out and up, as in the view
from an ocean-going ship. But here
not water, but tallgrasses crest, wave.
We were all underwater once.