Blur Dome

Up in early morning sticky-mouth

day.  The heater kicks in and steals

all moisture from my mouth, up

in the deep freeze feeling as though

I’m completely gone in a desert

tin-shack.

But no dessert this particular morning,

outside is killing cold and snow heaping

up on the surface of long midwest

voids and rolling hill ‘flat land’ -

limitless chalky cold sky blending in

with the horizon - no distinction

between sky and land, only cold.

Slicked up secret Omaha streets, more

dead ends than any other

city I’ve known, except for Munich

with its myriad mazes of narrow streets.

Nobody rules these streets or night or

stray plastic grocery bag trapped in

iced over gnarl of tree branches

stripped of all leaves and signalling

winter to come.  

Gifts and merriment, home

at full tables, plentiful harvest,

land of plenty, blank dreams

in the warm hush of heater mornings.

Planted like afterburner thought in the

frozen husks nodding broken twigged

trembling phantom stillness, the retreated

blur-dome and I never know what I

have dreamed until

the outside elbows me towards it,

Nebraska - stillness that breathes like an old

                    woman.

- - - - - - - - -

(December, 2013)