Moreau River Basin

Moreau River Basin

Out across this wide expanse of moving

grasses I can pick out depth and distance

the cut bank in the foreground, speckled loosely

above its sandy flesh with tufts of goldenweed

and drystalk, the fading haze of treed folds

that meet a stark horizon, the brief flash

of a pickup cab crawling slowly into the valley between

dotted round-bales and prairie-dog holes.

Distance and proximity are products of

perspective—not singular, but binocular—one eye

beside another, my brain joining the two flat images

into one fully realized space.

And likewise, depth of thought calls for standing

beside one's self, refusing the thin snapshot

of bias to, instead, flesh-out what would otherwise

be only the skin of reality. This capacity

to see myself in the picture as a relational part

of the action is the corrective lens for all my

centricism, reminds us all that we are not

God, but that God can draw us out,

telescoping mere certainty into multifaceted

clarity, the kind of vision that places me briefly

beside the sleeping dog in the truck bed, and then sprawls me

carelessly in the grass above the bank

before I soar with these cloud-shadows over folded fields and

treetips toward that blue horizon.

When the world lifts up from the Polaroid

of the individual, animated by eyes and ears not our

own, but that we have owned none-

theless,

we become partakers in the world

and the river digs deeper beneath the fields like the

prairie dog or the soul on this ridge

seeing with two eyes—both the one

he was born with and the one he's been given.