Canvas shoes, pants,
a lone Indian walks
to New Wilmington
through Amish farmland,
green rolling, the houses
surprise each hill, white
as a smoke, blue doors
for their marriageable daughters.
We were driving some place,
two men nodded
waving their arms
from the Thirty Years’ War.
The wheat waved and nodded
over the bones
of the Erie, the Shawnee,
the Delaware, the Iroquois.
We drove though there is
no place to go and
the future is shut
by our shutting it.
For we ran much, filled
all the cracks, emptied
and filled the valleys
of the complex Earth.
And it’s done, oh
bearded ones, girls in-a-ring,
grief-reared face travelling
nowhere, into Ohio.