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2023 Thomas McGrath Prize

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THE PRAIRIE

by Casey Fuller

You should wake now to remember the prairie. For it is reappearing as we run our eyes  over the words. It may be false to imagine what you only fly over: so what details we place  in the erasure might feel like a flower crown laurelling the brow of the dead. A death we imagined,  yes, since it’s one that circulates in memory, so we might call it “un-remembering the prairie.”  You should rise now and un-remember the prairie, for, in that recollection, you might  rearrange it to “just above the prairie.” See how the falsity begins in present, ending  somewhere where these words start to end, infecting that first layer, the anti-place where  memory shines brightly, that ash. (Not the treasure house you dreamt of, but the gray-scape  where you honestly spend most of your life wandering in your mind, which, oddly feels firm,  footed, empiric, for that place is inside a river, nevertheless, you could call it “of the prairie,”  where no one can truly drift below, no oil resides, no person, no town is drowned by a dam.)  And gray in life, too, lost in the first layer, to that anti-place you dis-remember, a flower crown  circling your own head, black oil there, as if footed, firm, empiric, for that place is a river,  like a windrower mowing down grass from the land. Meadowlarks and blackbirds flute  above and below where no oil resides, no person, no town is drowned by a poorly planned dam. And gray in life, too, flute and twitter beyond a pale rage for order, circulating in time,  that ash, where river rocks glisten under a crosshatch of broken branches, where the air  is scent-flecked with fresh hay, the meadowlarks and black birds flute above and below,  a musk of smoke circling the pale air. They flute a song beyond the rage for order, enskyed: everything flies over us here. Where the air is scent-fleck with fresh hay (in the place  we are landed) the prairie is redacted, in a mixed musk of diesel and impending cold, beside  a catchment of brown brambles, ice-still and blue starred, tall grass and silver sa

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