BOOM
By Heid E. Erdrich Pale wool, blue horizon design, an itchy landscape. We all wore the same bargain sweater, in an airplane, in a dream. Boom. A fight erupts. Take your seats please, and can we have peace? No more argument from you, Mister Mr. Not-Our-Same-Sweater-Wearer. The radio wakes me with its cultured accent: “The Labor Department today said…” Push. Push. Push, my beloved urges as he snaps it to snooze. Snow and silence fill things with nothing. But you all know that from Stevens. Still, stillness. Swirls of subconscious speak still, so early my yearning bares itself: prairie, butte, air so huge you gulp, you might go down, drown from so much sky. Such perfect absence. There’s nothing there but birds whirling, snow geese as far as the eye sees. North Dakota winds in grassland, now that’s constancy. Buffalo grass glows, frosted, flowing, speaking low, secretive. Used to be there was nothing there. Close it up, they used to say. Return it to the Buffalo. Forget Indians. Wind churns a million watts. Gas burns ancient marshes off. Coal pits deep and busy, like messy little cities. Tell you what, drive out at night. This is what an engineer in Fargo urges. Flares for miles, he promises, as far as the eye… Boom. Reprinted by permission of Heidi Czerwiec, editor, North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets (2015, ND Institute for Regional Studies Press, NDSU).
The title of the anthology comes from a famous line written by one of North Dakota’s best-known poets, the late Tom McGrath. The book is published by and available through the Institute for Regional Studies Press at North Dakota State University, at the UND Bookstore, and other venues in the region. In paperback, the cost is $12.50. A description of the anthology notes, “The scope of the poets in this collection is as broad as the landscape itself, including work by Heid E. Erdrich, Mark Vinz, Debra Marquart, Ed Bok Lee, and North Dakota’s Poet Laureate, Larry Woiwode.” The poets anthologized in the book include “seasoned and emerging voices, women and men, old and young, those from the ranching and oil-flared badlands west of the Missouri, and from the flood-prone river valley farmlands of the east,” Czerwiec says in the introduction.
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