PAWNEE BUTTES

            Keota, smallpox small.

            Stone gravestones of infants in the dry wind;

            The young who would be dead of old age by now

            Had they not died so young.

            The old man peeps out the store's lone window

            Past dusty flowers in their pots on the ledge.

He sells us his homemade postcards with the map we follow through the grasslands brought low back in the dust bowl.

                       

            Pronghorn evade us on eroded hills.

            Windmills spot the dull, blonde grass.

            Closer we see cattle guards, cattle,

            And, in a sudden, the nipple tops of Pawnee Buttes,

            Side by side. The breasts that give no milk.

            By foot we wander along the dry gulch to the cliffs;

            Uncover an arrowhead from the Pawnee past, warm in the palm;

            Then scale the scaly, clay walls of the eastern butte, easier to climb.

The wind tries to tear us off halfway; half-light to sunset.

            Dusk forces us down, and we wander back

            Through the gulch's occult penumbras.

            We drive home in the prairie dark

            With lightning flashes and the crash of thunder.

            No one speaks as we pass the old man's store in Keota.

            We spot his somber face inside the window;

            His brooding eyes watch us drift away in the dark.

                                                --C.S. Cholas, Colorado, 1973