From the Railing of a Country Bridge

[underthewronghat]

 From the Railing of a Country Bridge

Mist fills the air above Rabbit River.
The fields are plowed, seed-ready, opening
themselves to the arms of thickening clouds.

Before this land was tended, prairie grasses
shimmied in the heat of endless summer,
bowed to buffalo who ventured this far.

Back then life fed on sunlight - on the chirps
and low whistles of the night, on the grunts
of meadow beasts and the breathless expanse
that the heart of  winter makes of all of this.

My car windows start to fog. Truck tracks
in the sopped field roads fill with despair.  
I see in the distance a grain truck making
its way up the wet pavement toward market.

Teagan,

This is some really odd diction.  I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.  Without marking the scansion, it feels very stop-and-go, rather jerky --a tongue twister.
I think this jerky diction fits best on "in the sopped field roads fill with despair."  I'm really bouncing around on that line.  This may push the boundaries of "mild critique," but I'm going to scan a few lines.

 _   _       /          /        /     /   _    _    /
in the sopped field roads fill with despair

This is Anapestic trimeter, but the middle foot is all stressed.  I think this is really a brilliant marriage of diction and imagery, where without showing it (there are only tracks, no actual truck), we feel the truck bouncing through ruts in the field.  The downside is that I almost miss the "despair" at the end, because the music of the line is so bouncy, and I'm thinking of the truck.  I initially hear "fields," but the plurality lands on "roads," which takes me out of my own rhythms.  I stop and re-read, surprised at the feel of the line.  

I like to be surprised by this sort of thing, but only here and there, and not as a consistent tripping through the meter of the poem.

   /    _     _   /    _   /    /   _    /  _
Mist fills the air above Rabbit River

Here we're switching awkwardly between Trochaic and Iambic Pentameter.  This creates a musical emphasis on "Rabbit River," perhaps too much emphasis.  Now usually I don't comment much on the actual scansion of lines, but almost every line (to my ear) has a musical break, and I needed to "break it down" a little to figure it out.  For my money, the meter feels too awkward for too long, I'd back off a little.  Maybe give the scenes from the past a more fluid diction.  

Aside from the crazy meter of the poem, there's not much which cuts against the serenity of the field (back then).  Both present and past feel somewhat calm to us.  I think the meter gives you some energy on that front, but the comparison feels a little soft.  I'd take a poetic license to have modernity intrude more rudely into the field.

Cheers for making me scan...  ;-)