"Nebraska is located on the Great Plains, once a deep-rooted prairie ecosystem that sustained abundant large mammals- bison, elk, deer, mountain lions, wolves- and nomadic/ semi-nomadic native tribes who made use of the abundant wild animals, plants, and clean water found here. It is easy to mistake a wallow for a tombstone, but on the day I wrote this poem, I decided to invite, instead, the optic of exquisite threat." I am probably always in the-cheering-for-the-animal half of our species, so I went with it. Why should we mistake it for defeated? Why shouldn’t it rise again? One time when I was at a rodeo, the announcer asked, 'Who here is cheering for the bulls?' Half the crowd roared. Now reduced to specimen, what’s left is mostly memorial, but like any other biome the prairie is in no way inert. The tall grass prairie was once itself for its magnitude, just how any other ocean is oceanic for its disorienting size. But I could mourn, or I could imagine, so I erred toward possibility, wrote a poem as a dream of the biome’s revenge. No matter how much my being from the prairie is a result of the same particular history, the tall grass prairie and its native peoples’ near total evisceration under settler colonialism and extractivist capitalism still breaks my heart. Wallows are dents written in the fields by the bison’s bodies, and in that now bisonless land, a wallow was a language made of two words: 'We were.' Any thought of the prairie’s former vastness has always met in me a feeling of a proportionately vast grief. "I was once a little girl in Kansas, and my mother pointed me toward every bison wallow she saw. I couldn’t help but write into and about these juxtapositions and contradictions." Though the boys were playing in the alleyways and streets, shouting back and forth to each other, because of the sirens nearby, their play was always circumscribed or, at the very least, in conversation with the violence that consumes the national news and the reigning narrative about Chicago. While visiting the National Park of Pullman, my ear was pulled toward the boys playing tag, weaving in and out of yards and parked cars, yelling ‘run, nigga.’ The boys yelling ‘run, nigga’ seemed like both a warning and celebration, particularly in a city like Chicago where this type of entreaty could be both threat and jubilee. The poem begins with a building that can do nothing but burn throughout the twentieth century in a utopic community built by the railroad magnate, George Pullman, for his workers, a community that very few people of color lived in until recently. "Utopias don’t last long if they last at all. I wrote this poem in the voice of the creek to meditate on its present and ancient passages through lives and deaths, and our future." Jorie Graham asks, 'is it more eco-poetic to write about the bird or to write about the bulldozer about to destroy the bird’s habitat?' Though they continued to protest the mill dams, which destroyed their shad fisheries, the Lenape were already ninety percent decimated by 1682. The Brandywine Creek powered flour mills, cotton mills, and paper mills that supplied Ben Franklin’s print shop and the paper to print the Declaration of Independence. While we think of our parks as places that Americans have saved-and I am grateful William Bancroft had the power and vision to preserve Beaver Valley-our beloved creek reminds me that the Lenape (or Delaware) Nation lived on its banks before European immigrants arrived, and that the woods I walk have recovered from being cleared. At one bend of the creek a woman waded knee-deep, coaxing her horse to follow. The day I visited, kayakers, canoeists, and tubers floated under a cool green canopy. "The Brandywine Creek enters Delaware about five miles north of Wilmington. In this effort, the desert is full of mirages, which may not be mirages at all but living acts of memory held in common with the earth." The openness of this region lends itself to myth, to big story, to the engaged imagination hard at work for centuries in the act of understanding and in trying to see what is profoundly in front of us. Arizona is a place in which the human imagination is called upon to be complicit in understanding that this desert once was-so magically in this arid place, this very specific place-a forest. The Grand Canyon we can “see”-but to see the Petrified Forest, you must use a different set of eyes. The great expanses of northern Arizona are geologic in their scope-human measures are not adequate to understanding them. In driving through the area, which is large, however, the more the place began to change before me. Petrified wood lay everywhere, in greater and lesser amounts, but it just seemed like curious rock. "I remember first coming to the Petrified Forest as a very young man and wondering what all the fuss was about.
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