after Anita Beth McDaniel Swaim

1.

In a familiar wave, you set
your wires down for an edge,
are told you have taken on excess,
so you receive a cut
and feel the land fall away to the west.

You see how foreign dust
developed at a border.

You will never grow any larger.

2.

Musically, you are a rattle
breaking through tall grass,
a weighted drum of plow
felt in wooden yoke.

Even the reluctance of rain
hangs on a beat, drifting, and
again into a steep rush
sung into wide-valleyed theater.

You know to blow hard-lunged
with no warning
that spring of whirring strands unraveling
with train sounds hurled howling
in unrelenting night.

So few applaud come morning,
so few to applaud.

3.

To the work your hands tattered drew out of the weight of soil;

to the vote for a woman to represent you for years as a first for the state;

to the hills you traced with your hundreds of feet alive in the face of long years,
            when rain never saw you,
            when the prairie hung a dry hope to your heart.

4.

Three deer scamper across the road toward a house;
there is always the shock of a body we may encounter,
and you approach in this way a return:
to the land as much as to a fissure.

For a little while let us be ghosts
tracing with a sure balance
this recovery of what
scene a covered wagon crossed,

what the prairie lost in a dust storm.

Let the naming of what happened untie the ends.

– Ryan Clark

Author’s Note: “Ode to Harmon County” is part of a longer project which traces the history of a section of southwest Oklahoma that (until 1896) was part of Texas. In writing this poem, I used a unique method of homophonic translation which relies on the re-sounding of a source text, letter by letter, according to the various possible sounds each letter is able to produce (ex: “cat” may become “ash” by silencing the ‘c’ as in “indict,” and by sounding the ’t’ as an ‘sh-‘ sound, as in “ratio”). The source text for this poem was itself an original poem entitled “Ode to Harmon County,” authored by Anita Beth McDaniel Swaim and displayed at the Harmon County Historical Museum in Hollis, Oklahoma. There is, however, no language of note that was carried over from the original to my translation, and so the two poems are entirely unalike.