This book of poems is dedicated to
both sides of my family, who,
since sometime around
the Civil War,
have farmed the fields
surrounding Spoon River,
and to Edgar Lee Masters,
Bard of Spoon River,
who died five days
before I was born.
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A Country Where Little
but Corn Endures
A stark, monotonous land, encompassed
by a distant, uninterrupted horizon
as though all the shimmering miles of corn
were a shoreless sea...
and there, adrift
on the windblown acres, a solitary
derelict barn collapsed on its timbers,
the western peak of its roof abruptly
pitching out of the corn like the tilted
prow of a sinking ship...
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The Locale of the Poems
Northern Spoon River, between Osceola
and Wyoming, Stark County, Illinois
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