Dennis Hinrichsen

Pedal Steel Death Song

At 32,000 feet the fields resemble a wreckage of abandoned quilts.
Patterns: welts and dying moons.

Wallace County, Kansas
38° 54' 29” N   101° 35' 18" W
⌁

earth is sleeping 			with its mouth wide open
center-pivot tongue 			gushing

as if a grid of world clocks			were kissing
systematic		     runaway 

mouth and mouth and
mouth					western Kansas

you can see it from the air
						     the siege engines
graduated nozzles

trolling beautifully coined fields		

					     there is money in it
there is yield
as there will never be in moonlight	or friend dying

last words swallowed			     last vapors

where does language go		when body fails

I have pulled so much from that unseen reservoir of reading
I wish I had the patent on closure now

					     or if only for fiddle
or steel guitar
one simple twanging musical phrase
			     I would use it now to indicate (             )

Dennis Hinrichsen is the author of eleven full-length collections of poetry, including Dominion + Selected Poems, Flesh-plastique, and schema geometrica, winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize for poetic innovation. Among his other awards are the Grid Poetry Prize, the Field Poetry Prize, the Michael Waters Poetry Prize, the Tampa Poetry Prize, the Akron Poetry Prize, and the Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award. New work is forthcoming in Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Notre Dame Review, Posit and Waxwing. He lives in Michigan, where he served as the first Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing area.