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“As to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling), while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape.”
–Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (1879)
October 16th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
Agree in full… I treasure those wide open prairie spaces with the ability to see to the horizon. It provides a sense of ease and relaxation.
October 17th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
I wrote a poem about this before I went to the Paris American Academy in 2005 and published it on
Monday, July 18, 2005
Prairie Futures: just around the corner
Measuring the prairie—
an endless profusion of fractal dimensions
looking simple, guileless and plain
exploding in detail, the closer the view.
Steppes, backward in time and place,
too large for humans, humans who need trees.
A human can admire a redwood.
Cut it down for a deck.
Feel in control with the sweet sawn odor.
Great height brought to the level
straight up, straight down
Completely defined by a Euclidean postulate
Treeless plain, ocean of grass
So wide the horizon cringes below the skyline
Curved Einstein lines
geometry of bison cycle time
mindless to the point of loss, incomprehensible and unbounded,
an ever changing now place
Horizons curve away
Space curves in, delirium channeled back
in desert mirages.
Moonlight finds the water filled pot holes.
Pops them out like mirrors of the stars in the night,
ephemeral like the colors of the season . . .
Jefferson sent out survey crews to make land sections
right angle squares on a flat plane
Boundaries overlapping the parallels that converge at the poles.
Jogs on plains county roads confuse straight with north
contour crossing with simplicity, but
it reassured the landless occupiers with fence lines guides.
A few generations of scourge and all that remains—
featureless enclaves of refuges—
just as before, names change, desperation their common
claim to a forgotten agrarian past.
God must have sneered when he formed it;
only boundless imagination persists in this emptiness.
The physical abandons the human primates there
They become ethereal beings that can tolerate displacement
understand death as they live, and
move through the order that surrounds them.
But their weight is not detectable,
they are creatures of light whose speed is absolute.
posted by HL at Monday, July 18, 2005