Americana (abridged)

So when you fly from Appleton to Denver, the first things you see are small farms with one farm house and one barn each - perfect, quarter acre squares cut out of the landscape with roads between that run exactly north and south, and exactly east and west. This continues for hours, although you might go in and out of cloud cover, but when you emerge there it is again, that midwestern grid, all the way across the middle. Then, eventually, as you head west, you start to see the circles. They are bigger than the squares were, a whole acre each, perfect green circles and you can see along a radius the straight black irrigation pipes that define them, and brown bits at the corner before the next circle in the quilt. Then as you go further west there's more brown, and fewer circles, and some gentle undulations of the land but it's more barren and scrubby. And then just when you're sick of that, the captain announces your descent into Denver and asks you to fasten your seat belt and put your seat backs and tray tables into the locked position, and then if you're by the window you look out and see what seems like a line of low clouds defining the western horizon but as you get closer it's clear that it's snow at the top of the mountains, and when the plane swings around either to the right or to the left to approach the runways you see sun glint off the tall buildings downtown. You look out over it, that distinctive Colorado vegetation and the city and the peaks beyond, and wince with all those memories of being young and new and learning to drink and dance and all the rest of it, but as the plane taxis you look out over it, that brown scrubby landscape, and you’re reclaiming it and it’s yours.

Written after a flight in September as part of an email (thanks DJ for permission to reprint), abridged as above and read out to a poetry group tonight.