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My Grandmother's Helicopter |
My grandmother’s helicopter clatters butter churn rotors,
skims mid west wheat fields like a dragonfly with blue hair.
In America no distance is too great to be beaten like egg whites
for lemon meringue skies, roadside cafes where you can read the waitress’s
names sewn on their uniforms so truck drivers can pretend
they’re not looking at her breasts. My grandmother learned to fly
from watching windmill vanes draw water up from deep underground,
silver fingers sifting the bones of her mother and father,
metal tang on the tongue from cisterns echoing with condensation drip.
My grandmother turns her helicopter upside down to harvest corn,
wheat, alfalfa as green as a Confederate general’s beard,
she knows the price of soy beans and the value of clouds
spiky with lightning bolts, my grandmother spins across Kansas
like the tornado that tore Dorothy out of her ignorance
and dropped her on top of the ruby slippers, another example of a crash landing.
copyright 2006
David
Thornbrugh |
