This Book Belongs To
Keen Art Deco sunbeams arrow the horizon.
Two horses plow beneath Nebraska glare.
Jacket torn away, golden case stamp faded brown,
the nameplate bears her schoolgirl signature,
creased corners where she folded yellow pages down.
This prairie town shunned outsiders, kept dirt local:
Divorce, two suicides, abandonment,
unspoken scandal of a pregnant woman’s fall,
the yearning man reduced by increments
to terminal despair and crossroads burial.
She underscored nine lines equating happiness
with death, slow dissolution into air.
A 1940s hairpin marked the sentence where
bold Ántonia took Jim’s hand — caress
he wandered decades to renew, lost businessman
conveyed by train across long-fallow land.
I see my mother read by flashlight in the dark,
imagining that border when the veil
of breath evaporates into new planted soil,
damp with possibility as skylarks
vector home, layers of refraction without end
or source, mirage she someday will ascend.