Corn Under Nebraska Big Sky

Corn Under Nebraska Big Sky

Homestead Cemetery:

Mapping Nebraska from Red Cloud

James Hart 

for Carl August Rauscher, 1916-1997

A road sign reminds us Red Cloud lies west of here,
a town’s cloudless shroud over a hundred years away
from northwest Nebraska where we’re driving slow
toward family grounds my wife hasn’t visited for years.
Becalmed by miles, she tells me there’s no single phrase
embracing this whole landscape where Cather anchored
prairie memories like dreams or ships riding tidal sky,
and we go on, mapping time through vanishing towns.
Northwest of Omaha, the land starts to rise and trough
in waves, the broadest valleys I’ve ever seen, and I think
of covered wagons threshing this tall thrashing grass
as little changes in the mind’s empire, or an emptiness.
Here the wind speaks hawk syllables dropping down
like feathered gods, as ominous now as then when
Luther’s strapping sons fell here from Vaterland
and began beating corn into swords for their Lord.
You tell us your great grandfather’s long passage here,
teenage stowaway who cobbled shoes to work his way
through an odyssey we can’t comprehend, a mute epic
in it straight out of Alger with one O. Henry irony:
any genealogy you do both begins and ends with him.
Later, we’ll find ourselves in Johnstown with them,
a pilgrimage to homestead site and cemetery, a flood
of memories your dad rode that day, his stories of cows
and corn mapping boyhood one last time for our sons,
an older vessel voiding time. I can’t recall the sky
that day, but surely hawks flew dark above us there
where August sunlight swept red down the last clouds
and sky foundered valleys through long tidal night
as clash of sabers rose from corn’s green legions
on this homestead floating among cemetery stars.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled Somewhere West of Never)