No Thru Traffic

by Ted Kooser

The county has closed off the one road
into and out of what we living here
on the plains would all call a valley,
a wide, marshy shallow with a flicker
of meandering creek in a long trough
of willows and cattails, and the road crew
is replacing an old iron bridge —
girders, rivets and rust under flaking
aluminum paint — with a huge concrete
culvert, the first thing with an echo
that’s ever been placed here, the whole
system altered in that wink of an eye
that’s one summer in hundreds. Then
the crew with their roaring equipment
will go, leaving the grass by the road
to spring back from the truck tracks,
and behind them a shadowy hollow
with an amplified trickle and the first
red–winged blackbird to ever fly through
toward a distant, bright circle of prairie,
hearing its sharp territorial cry
flap back at it from every direction.