Part One: The Plains

These are the six edited prose poems I wrote while in Kansas.  They are in the first draft of a novella (or chapella, an Amandaism) I am putting together for one of my creative writing classes for this semseter.

Since this is the first post, I guess just respond however you want, whether it be via the comments section or a response post, or (hopefully!) both.  Editing is also appreciated.

Enjoy!

It starts with an orange tabby, fat from farm mice, who drinks dripping groundwater from a rusty pump, painted sky-blue but faded storm-cloud-grey. And the sky is clear of all clouds, save a few thin white wisps that infrequently obscure the sun. We stand together in a circle in front of the limestone farm, waiting for someone to grant us passage across the sea of grass, vast in its golden green. A bus eventually arrives, and it too is painted sky-blue. Its driver welcomes us to his home, with a calm voice and bright smile. His hat is off, and remains off, almost as if this were his house of worship.

House cats (we leave him sitting in the doorway, licking his tail between his paws) are traded for black dots who spend their days on the horizon grazing only the greenest, freshest grass and making the most natural, golden love. He names them buffalo, large and gentle beasts, but they are just too far away to see as anything else than black dots on the horizon. He describes the act of burning, and its essentiality in the cycle of existence. Fire burns to create life from death, green from the dance of red and gold.

A body of water, motionless, is visible from the hill where we stand, each horizon stretching farther than our eyes allow us to see. Rolling landscapes skew perception and concepts such as distance, time, love. Together, we motionlessly observe the vastness of the sea and its intricacies of life: a small plover skims the top of the lake, disturbing its surface; a black-spotted forest green lubber hops from the cover of one thatch to the next; the sun burns, its warmth filling us with life.

The running water that we hear is the tall grass dancing in the western wind. We feel it on our backs, the air that has brushed across every seed and every flower, hidden within hills of gold. The bright colors of petals do not stand out until we stop and look closely, which is also when we notice that everything in the world is moving, each in a different direction, each to its own rhythm.

I sit in a stream with you and daydream. Around us, water seeps slowly into the ground and through cracks in the limestone until it reaches the layer of impermeable shale. Lakes form from this process, thousands of years at a time.

I imagine beautiful horses galloping across this world where the wind is the current which carries the freshness of life. However, there are no horses, and even this place is too touched by man: a drainage pipe, and a metal insignia on a rock outside of the wire fence, and even this ditch, fashioned as a means to control the destructive man-made art of holocaust.

Sun-bleached bones lay hidden in the grass, until I pick one from the ground and notice its dirtied underside. How long has this creature waited since death for you and I to acknowledge its existence? We cannot name the specific bones, nor identify what they might have been in life, but most peculiar is their proximity to the old schoolhouse with presidential floors and empty children’s desks. What beast could die here, alone and unnoticed?