(Week Six) Improvisation #4 of Form

of Edward Hirsch's "Ocean of Grass"

I love this one, so I wrote it all out first:

The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh
and unbroken prairie stretched for hundreds of miles
so that all she could see was an ocean of grass.

Some days she got so lonely she went outside
and nestled among the sheep, for company.
The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh

and prairie fires swept across the plains,
lighting up the country like a vast tinderbox
until all she could see was an ocean of flames.

She went three years without viewing a tree.
When her husband finally took her on a timber run
she called the ground holy and the wind harsh

and got down on her knees and wept inconsolably,
and lived in a sod hut for thirty more years
until the world dissolved in an ocean of grass.

Think of her sometimes when you pace the earth,
our mother, where she was laid to rest.
The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh
for those who drowned in an ocean of grass.


My improv':


Think of her sometimes when you separate
laundry, when you curse the socks for always
being lost or mismatched. Toss them indifferently
in a drawer like a graveminder neverminds dirt,
where a body lays folded in its inhabited habits
next to a stranger, not so unlike himself, separated
only by soil--the compost, the junkyard of earth.