for Sayre, Oklahoma

Say you’re
first called
to a river.

Say you lunge
over it and
hold there
each side
of the water,
each
muddy track
laid around it.

Riverton is
the end of you
as a feral thing
in shortgrass.

A name
made the houses
belong to the river,
to the fissure
of border
running under
everything
growing out
of it
as if
floodwater
extended a city
and not the breath
of the Red River
loud with rain.

Say you’re
a sandy bank
offered a railroad.

Say you forsake
the river as a
face for a
market booming.

This is why
you adopt the
name you use
as you burn
converted
natural gas into
carbon black lines,
as you feed
to the railroad
official his name
as a town sign
saying Sayre.

And the city’s
speech hung loud
over its river
as the westward flow
of a dusty people
drove through
on the highway.

Say a live town
needs such claims
to the road, that
the river is not
a trust we need
anymore to realize
what forms us.

Say the boundary
line is just a bridge,
a quiet territory.