West Sunny Sands Road
Ruby Hansen Murray
Sun spills across miles of pasture, grass,
alders, cottonwoods on the ditch lines,
clouds a roll with coppered collars
A young teen, his father on the apron of their house
with a black dog, who thinks about a barking rush,
mother says CHARLIE.
What Americans make of life, a stretch of houses along the river,
Some piled with stuff, drift logs, machine parts,
others neatly painted, garages and storage buildings
ornamented with flags, political emblems.
The Bergs back in the field, a wooden signboard
with a raised Viking ship. Driveways lined with curbs,
with timbers, with pavers,
grass corralled, shorn, weed wacked.
A woman with white hair stands in an unmown lot around a mobile home,
raised beds, five-foot tall grass hacked along the property line. A compost tumbler,
a pink barrel pig sculpture. A brown tabby limps across the road by the ferry
landing. Hurries stiff-backed, one paw not right, up to the house, running
when a car is coming, into the messy garden, plants under bird netting.
Americans are called to neatness, rather than beauty.
Manicured lawns, neatness and sterility side by side.
Ruby Hansen Murray is a columnist for the Osage News. She is winner of The Iowa Review and Montana Prizes. A MacDowell and Hedgebrook fellow, her work is forthcoming in Cascadia: A Field Guide (Tupelo Press) and Ecotone, and has been nominated for Push Cart prizes and Best of the Net. Find her in Allotment Stories (University of Minnesota Press), River Mouth Review, Under the Sun, the Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, High Desert Journal, The Rumpus, and Shapes of Native Nonfiction. She’s a citizen of the Osage Nation with West Indian roots, living in the lower Columbia River estuary.
