Prairie, Under Full Moon

In the blooming period, everywhere is open.
Winds make you arrive where you do not want to go.

Disrupt the
Sequence of the hours.

Everything starts talking: bract, awn, butterfly,
Godwit.

                    *

You collide with the place,
Leave tattooed and bone crackled.

Even the chickens shout. Such that these are called
Booming grounds.

The sun appears to set unexpectedly.
The earth, to widen and shrink to a moving flatness,

As if Jacob’s ladder were built sideways.
Angels roam restlessly

Anxious to deliver
Their burden. They make crossings of weird

Gravity and synaptic light.

                    *

You see words are not always accurate.

Sometimes they are prone
To excess. And mutiny. What does the body mean to say by

Trembling?

                    *
O sparrow, speak the bird’s O until the breath runs out

You can read your wound. Its hidden seam.
Its slip-knot.

Eva Hooker is professor of English and writer in residence at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana. Her poems have appeared in The New England Review, AGNI, Terrain.org, and other publications.