poem

The poem I found on the Internet and posted a few days ago was an early version of a now published poem:

Notes From A Sodbuster's Wife, Kansas, 1868
-Peter Ludwin

What really got us in the end--
we women who didn't make it,
who withered and blew away in the open--
was the wind. Space, yes, and distance,
too, from neighbors, a piano back in Boston.

But above all, the wind.

In our letters it shrieks hysteria from sod huts,
vomits women prematurely undone by loneliness,
boils up off the horizon to suck dry
their desire as it flattened the stubborn grasses.
Not convinced?? Scan the photographs,
grainy and sepia-toned, like old leather.
Study our bony forms in plain black dresses,
our mouths drawn tight as a saddle cinch,
accusation leaking from rudderless eyes, betrayed.

I tried. Lord knows I tried.
Survived the locusts and even snakes
that fell from the ceiling at night,
slithering between us in bed.
I dreamed of water, chiffon, the smell
of dead leaves banked against a rotting log.
I heard opera, carriage wheels on cobblestone.
Cried and beat my fists raw into those earthen walls.

The wind. Even as it scoured
the skin it flayed the soul,
that raked, pitted shell.
And how like the Cheyenne,
appearing, disappearing,
no fixed location,

not even a purpose one could name.

© Peter Ludwin

Notes From A Sodbuster's Wife, Kansas, 1868 is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in South Dakota Review and can be found in Peter's just published collection, A Guest in All Your Houses.

The book is available from Word Walker Press or, in a few weeks, from Amazon.

Peter Ludwin’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, most prominently The Antietam Review, Chaminade Literary Review, Coal City Review, Illya's Honey, Karumu, Hurricane Review, Lullwater Review, Midwest Quarterly, Permafrost, Raven Chronicles, Lake Effect, Small Pond Magazine of Literature, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review and Whiskey Island Magazine.

Cross-posted from peripatetic patter.


Update: Here is a review of the book.