This is Kansas

Here From There

Even the locals cannot articulate the sky, the immense, the tireless way one must be, in thought, in relation. Stretches of Interstate 70 induce vertigo, a crisis of perspective that spills a person across wheat like the familiar dead skunk that drifts in then out again every few miles. And if you think of here from there, will you remember the sound of six giant combines pushing through wheat? The chaffy haze scattering light, the careful talk of men with questions of their own--of humidity and lightning, the urgency of harvest. Is there anything more beautiful? The slow flight of cattle egrets following combines. There in the just cut field they land and step, and poised like pure white signs they insist you look again.


Chet Gresham