I’m not sure if this poem has a point. It has its origin in my recollections of driving west from Winnipeg one July. If you have your word-processing program set to eliminate all formatting, you need to reset to show the lines centred on the page. Including the open and closing punctuation marks…
West of Winnipeg
--
Prairie
Flatlined horizon
Flax fields, canola fields
Patchworked blue and yellow
Swedish flag quilted on rich brown loam
Telephone poles poke out of the future, one by one,
Pass by, get sucked back down on the far side of yesterday
Paint-peeling elevators present a perpendicular yin to counter the landscape’s endless yang
I
Ceramic sky arcs overhead, kiln-glazed blue bowl, hemi sphere radiused out from me
Carboniferous ferns unroll as asphalt carpet
Ducks paddle in a reedy slough
Bullrush erections
Nothing ends
Ever
.
by Jim Taylor 2019