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She was born somewhere west of the desert and east of a valley, where the fields stretched past the horizon. A thought and a breath and she would be off running, her hair streaking with gold and bronze, a moving statue of fluid and life. Her name is not important, nor is her family history. She is here, she was here, always. Her dress is blue gingham. The hem is fallen and strings like spiderwebs curl around her bare dirty knees. Her heart is a space filled with time and tears and snow, though she has never known such cold. She is the heat of the stars and weighs as much as moonbeams. Her home is in her eyes, their lashes the front door and her ears the window through which the birds fly away from the hunter and his gun. She is wind and the rare rain which floods into her breaking house so that the floors are cleaned of dust and footprints and she is forgotten again by the land. She has no shoes. She is, more than anything, free beyond freedom, a face without horizon, a body that will grow and change and live forever. She does not walk paths, she does not know them. Years ago a road was carved by wagons and the curves wrought in the ground are canals for her to jump over and to wade in, dipping her frayed skirt in the brown and beige water. She is America, she is a thought in the back of your mind, she is the open plains that jut out from your driveway, waiting to be found again. I did not say my name because you know it well. And it is not a word. It is a symbol older than time itself, and in the curve between her chin and her neck you know it all too well. She is the color of the last ray of the sun and she is the hope that comes after it as you stand on tiptoe to watch the light die. You will go with her one day into the field, and if you return you will want only to go back again. Her step is a dance to a tune older than sound, the rhythm of a jackrabbit’s twitching ear and an earthquake are the same and they move our legs to steps we learned long before our grandfathers knew our grandmothers. She stretches out her arms that are made of milk and dust and you already know the question and you answer, softly, without speaking or moving, in a voice made by the breeze on your sleeves, yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.