Miracles happened every day there
Yet if I'd known then what I know now, mother,

instead of the Promised Land—with one-room schoolhouse
glowing in morning light, white and drenched with sun

visible on the rise from the back stoop
across green pastures of flood-irrigated grazing grass

where during lunch I chased dun lizards
through twisted greasewood and bombed cottonwood leaf boats

in the rocky creek with round white stones—
I might have been driven to the brink of breakdown

unable to go on living in that desert under
the relentless assault of wind and dust

going crazy like the wives of farmers
on the Plains during The Great Depression,

women pulling out fistfuls of hair
as angry nature came howling

under doors, around windows,
the walls of their homes so permeable

that even the chambers of their hearts filled up
with sand, their blood vessels turning to stone

10.

I can only guess how my center, my Eden,
for you, mother, a good Christian woman thrown into this desert

for God's own cruel amusement, left on the side of the road
in an overheated Pontiac Chiefain with busted radiator

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