In that time of great freedom to touch
and get touched,
we lived on the prairie amid polite
moral certainty. The sensate world seemed
elsewhere, and was.
On our color television the president's body
admitted he was lying. There was marching
in the suddenly charged streets,
and what a girl in headband and miniskirt
called communication. A faraway friend wrote
to say the erotic life
was the only life. Get with it, he said.
But many must have been slow-witted
during The Age of Enlightenment,
led artless lives during The Golden Age.
We watched the revolution on the evening news.
It was 1972
when the sixties reached all the way
to where we were. The air became alive
with incense and license.
The stores sold permission and I bought
and my wife bought until we were left
with almost nothing.
Even the prairie itself changed;
people began to call it the Land, and once again
it was impossibly green
and stretched endlessly ahead of us.