The Birds are Always in the Corn
on the way to see the palace made of
corn and rye and sourdock
I dreamed I was inside it
rearranging the sensibly upholstered
furniture
and you
not-my-husband
were there in your long wool coat
half-assuring me that you
weren’t bored
and as always we both kept on
wearing all our clothes and so I’m still
driving the speed limit along this
glistening belt
napping when I have to on gravel roads
off the highway next to the warm
golden grass that waves
over empty silos
whose aging missiles
the prairie has mostly given up
sunlight floods
the sparkling ditches and
washed-out roads
the towns
I am re-routed from with names
I might have given
my daughter
is it too much to ask
Beatrice
Amelia
why all the flags
are at half-mast
detoured past slumped sandbags
and houses submerged
in muddy skirts
I am ashamed to have been so slow
to figure all this beauty this shining
reservoir trembling the dam
constitutes
a disaster
so slow to recall that over and over our buildings
have been wrecked
to be suspicious of this golden
mythic light
suspicious
of such bounty that can mount a palace
made from surplus
and clad in cob and husk
when will
the birds descend
and strip its murals bare
curtain the windows
in their dark feathers
in a different
life I would be dreaming
of unbuttoning your coat
dreaming of the swollen bankless river
down which my empty dress
would float
Bethany Schultz Hurst is the author of Miss Lost Nation, winner of the Anhinga Poetry Prize and finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2015 and in journals such as Ecotone, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Narrative, and Ploughshares. A recipient of a literary arts fellowship through the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she is an associate professor at Idaho State University.
