Patch of grass

Barbara Duffey

—after Van Gogh, 1887

What we did while waiting for the rain:
We drove to a prairie remnant—
an unfarmed scrap without a footpath
with a plaque and a parking space
and a sky that sang the work songs
of the crickets, an elephant’s eye, etc.—
rarer than old growth forests, roots
twenty feet deep like burglar bars
on egress windows, dirt left behind like
a crumbling suitcase ensnared in them.
There’s a dandelion that in the reflectogram
a woman wears like a boutonniere
wilting, with the smell of dry earth.

Barbara Duffey is a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in poetry and the author of two poetry collections, most recently Simple Machines (The Word Works, 2016), which won the 2015 Washington Prize. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. An associate professor of English at Dakota Wesleyan University, she lives in Mitchell, SD, with her son and their chinchilla.