The Plexiglas in her bedroom doorway
is a sweet touch, letting us see but not feel her quilt— 

which doesn't look like Webster County on Google Earth,
its rectangular feedlots with its dots for cows, 
its alien circles from irrigation, its stubborn watercourses
zig-zagging, bucking the grid of roads— 

her quilt which between a thumb and forefinger
must be turning to dust, like Nebraska's 
fine talc of a soil, and not flooded by a wine-dark sea, 
but held in place by her wine-stained grass 

and letting us see but not touch the flowered wallpaper 
peeling away as evening primrose petals still do
on this side of the Plexiglas, see but not sniff
the walls' sauerkrautness

so in this photograph I took—took!— 
her wish to keep her room always as it was,
a Cather diorama, was honored, up to a point, 
beyond which 
                    we read and race home plum breathless,
most unreasonably excited, having got inside
another person's skin, her Annie, our Antonia,
and that aura in the picture I took is fixed
over her bed, a vague pentagram,

making us see her Jim, our Willa
in the clear solidity in her doorway. 

For days now one thing hums my head. 
A millennium ago this earth mound was rising
six inches a year, not on its own
unless dirt is as willful as we
believe we are, as they must have believed.
This mound built up two feet 
one year, the next cut one foot down, 
animating the centuries, the cursing sky's
mouth eating dirt, subject to water's will.  

Many humans murmur in my head.
Many humans keep hunched over carrying 
woven baskets filled with dirt working 
as the Birdman's animals, dump them 
where the Birdman points a winged arm. 
Many humans walk upright the sick babies 
of themselves back to the earth pit.  

All this takes place in the court 
of my head.  My own Birdman, my own 
man-god or god-man judges,
ten generations then, now carrying dirt
building this mound—now a millennium
later strolls, photographing itself,
a whole millennium pictured smiling
on top of a mound—until heaven's dirt rises 
a hundred feet, scores of bodies (in my head 
they're tattooed, feathers in red scars 
making their arms wings) carrying sacred logs 
to build the Birdman's lodge five stories.  

Now, always, dad steps deliberately, 
carrying his emptied carcass down from heaven.
He nods then, now, at a child climbing steps
one at a time, breathing deliberately
for the Birdman, seeing descending
dirt bearing dirt, being raised, the unrisen.