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