Revery Prairie

The reports from the keepers
Have recently been anguished—
The bees are in grave danger,

Are getting few. Without them,
What will agriculture do?
One of many collapses

Conditions are threatening,
And what can rumination,
Daydreaming, revery do?

Several million years have been
Great for grasses, many more
Millions for flowering plants.

With agriculture’s failure,
Could prairies make a comeback?
How much of nature’s temple

Can Homo agonistes
Bring down in self-destruction?
You can’t be here to know that.

Revery knows revery
Will go, probably will go
Before the bees, probably

Before the flowers, maybe
Not before agriculture.
Staring out a bare window

At a lizard in the brush
Growing from chewed-up desert,
Rumination imagines

The junipers and greasewood
And prickly pear and sandstone
Overgrown with tall prairie,

Or reduced to shifting dunes,
Or folded under forests.
But imagination’s weak,

Working with what memories
It can rearrange and pose
To show the impossible.

The possible will happen
Whether revery goes on
Or goes. It won’t be what’s known.