Bump Ahead and Prairie Grass

From the recent road trip; it wasn't much of a bump, but the scenery was spectacular!

Tonight another poem by James Galvin. I have been working with the almost-sonnets in Lowell's Notebook, 1967-1968, which Charles Wright mentioned in an old interview. But I have to admit their density defeated my tired mind. They much be poetry for the morning hours, at least my morning hours.

High Plains Rag

But like remorse
the prairie grass
seeks emptiness,

increases
in its sleep,
gets even

with the fragrant,
stoic sage.
Oh it is witless

and blind.
It cannot remember
what it was doing

with all that wind.
It waits
for a thimbleful of rain.

It populates such distances
it must be brave
but prairie grass

bends down in sorrow
to be so lost,
and like remorse

feels
so nearly endless
it can never stop.

James Galvin 
from Resurrection Update; collected poems 1975-1997, page 87.

The delicious short lines and the prairie-breeze-like movement of the thought through this poem please me very much, There is a lot to be said for short lines arranged in three-line stanzas. So many things to try!