The World and the Earth

More like a trail of arrowheads
covered over with dirt,
these turned fields in Illinois.

This world consumes
every energy given it;
pulls your body
to its edge,
snakes its hands
into your front pockets
and pulls them inside-out,
pushes everything it finds there
into the yawn of its own horizon.

I feel my ghost
straining
against my bones.

I once did
and will again
step across the river stone
of town-edges

and find the simpler earth
within the world.