This is not about my home on the range. This is about prairie songs on a wind one thousand miles long.

I knew two anthems as a kid. To the red, white and blue, and oh, give me a home. Year after year, in class, at assemblies, and at every school event, the flat blue song, that assumes homelessness. A plea for a perfection that already surrounds us. The song that defines heaven by what it is not: not cloudy. Whole herds of seldom, untroubled by discouragement.

And heaven as room to play. Especially deer, particularly antelope. The anthem for endless flat blue sky, endless yellow prairie, endless encouragement; that places endless as the best of all possible endings.

oh bury me not

We sang while surrounded by vivid fertility. Not even hills left, everything surrendered into a forever shivering, aerobic hide of horny grass. Of Kansas.

and his voice failed there

Where tattered is still a thick host of crushed green fur, and threadbare is merely sod, two foot thick. Where gargantuan primitive grass, 8 foot high, sets pale talons into black farmable soil, 8 foot deep. All the way in.

but we took no heed

Where deep fecundity sneers at such lightweights as us. Putterly humans.

of his dying prayer

I sing the prairie songs as often as not, still. All sad songs, songs of lost boys and fallen girls. Loss, and tragic love, songs of hope and pure-d hate, of dumb death and ghosts, and violets in the cottonwood draws.

In a narrow grave, just 6 x 3

Young men, stuck in the lost place, foundering to the grave, mama in their pockets. Old, old in their crabbed hearts, gunned down; the red rose bloomed on their chests, over an ill word, a wrong card, a bad deal.

we buried him there

I reversed it, came east, to the smelting cities, the steam and shove of not enough, too many, move over, make room. My old folks, back home, are all moved on, too, or dead and dying, poor but lucky. Looking out, as they do, over a glacial rise, with a beautiful regard for Kansas.

on the lone prairie

No dissolve for me, no slow merge with yards of alluvial blackness for me. All ends are hasty back east. I will be mere remains, here.

But one dies slow in Kansas, easing into the great grassy pond of it. Delayed in memory. Carried in each other's pockets, together, in a wept-on forever, until those pockets are lost, too, and those pockets, and those.

and the cowboys now

No passengers in Kansas are unprotected, no pilots young or foolish; all are well-met, with calloused hands and slow consideration. It takes all evening to finish saying "hey".

as they roam the plain

A home's comfort is measured in slaps of screen doors, as the heat retreats, and the lights becomes small. Homes inhabited by loud breakfasts, galleoned lunches, lingering dinners, over mis-matched dishes a hundred years old. No one stalls for long. Jump starts just pull over.

for they marked the spot

Small floral prints hold off decay. In the must of the barn is the urgency of foals, the glamour of honest dust, and piled everywhere are wheat, corn, rye and sorghum.

where his bones were lain

This is not about my prairie home, the homes I saw from without, through windows in transit, the home I still see, the home I gave up hope for, pockets empty.

fling a handful of roses

The home I headed west for, north for south for, and ended up east for. The home I finally won, and lost, to pay for terrible and imperative medicine.

o'er his grave

This is about the home I built with perspecacity, that fine word from our fine steppes, out of straws clutched, stamped with sweat and mortared with everything I could dig for. The real home of my heart. I am always with fine Kansas, even here; my profile is always low, my hearth small, small enough to fit in my pockets, an ember carried everywhere.

with a prayer to Him

My home pulled around on teetering cart wheels, built up every day from my roots, for the fine Kansas folks I raise, up from me and memory, who say please and thank you, who ride and spin and run and roam, who are given a home and a long hey, whose warm windows are always lit from within, whose fires are banked with a slow hand, a tender restraint, where the thousand mile wind, the long wind, stirs and rattles and never breaks.

that his soul be saved