Dargie Anderson
West from the twenty-eighth floor,
Kansas is a miracle of boredom,
a Vermeer landscape of plains-state exurb
stretching into country. A rubble of vegetation
accumulates around the loading docks,
the mini-storage, the viaducts,
disappears into that blank of middle distance,
a few striations of green and silver and brown
ending in murky overcast sky.
Below, the bend in the interstate just west of the river
where I-670 curves to avoid a bluff.
It is a tight turn by interstate standards,
emblazoned with yellow suggested speed limit signs
that seem to threaten disaster for those who don't slow to forty.
A promise of excitement, followed by letdown.
It's that the bluff that the curve was built to avoid
could be something, but isn’t. No mountain.
No disaster. Not really even a bluff,
just thirty or forty feet of graded slope easing into sprawl.
It's been a messy spring and everything is overgrown,
crabgrass in sidewalks, clover clumping
under the lowest line of barbed wire where the cows can't reach.
There is gravel everywhere, in the highway margins,
at the construction site;
the creeks are muddy alleys without boulders or bends.
It's Tuesday, you left your phone charger at home and
meant to send your kid with money for the book fair,
everything is sprawling
off just a little further than would be your preference—
into the horizon, out of reach,
off toward the Colorado border.