Tell me the landscape in which you live,
And I will tell you who you are.
Jose Ortega y Gassett
 
 
Emptiness looks like this: a bleached skeleton
of earth and sky, a black backbone of road.
 
The wind unfastens songs caught in the barbed
wire fence, gives the earth no home.
 
The loneliness that haunts you is of abandoned farms,
carcass husks, a child walking into the dark.
 
Your body is a sweet vocabulary I discover
one syllable at a time...bunchgrass, buck brush, bullrushes.
 
There is joy in the grace notes of the meadowlark,
the triumphant shoots of barley, this wild cartography of longing.