COME TO LIFE each spring, who knows more about being born again? Grass rolls on the earth, thrashes in the wind, speaks in tongues thin as a hummingbird’s. Blue-eyed, Little Quaking, Prairie Wool, Brome. Grass could be Appalachian. In its country churches without doors and windows, without roofs, it charms the snakes. Limbless, they rasp through the stems. They belly-glide; then, sleepy as cats, they draw circle after circle and lie still. Lovers, too, recline in the meadow, believing grass douses their bright flare so no one can see them. In ditches and unscythed lots, children duck and whisper, hiding from the one who counts to ten. Prairie Satin, Fox Sedge, Wild Rye. You are grass’s daughter, grass’s son. It will never orphan you. Even as you wade through the lush creases of a coulee, burs and spears catching in your socks, it knots and thatches, becoming day by day the blanket that will warm you when you sink into the earth. Foul Manna, Needle Grass, Dropseed, Switch.