In the American West, words mean what they say. I’m going to the American West and the American South. I’ll see the bessemer in the steel mills and the corkscrew cacti and skeleton mountains. I’m going to the sultry jungle of hanging cypresses and the ripe cotton and the heatwaved macadam, to the sweet blue Pacific and clifftop sea-zephyrs, into forests of pine and red cedar and distancing golden afternoon light on brown fallen forestneedles. Through natural monuments and into ancient mountains, wind down needlestick trails that take you to the turbid sprawling Mississippi, great American river with veins flowing over the slurry countryside and the cordoned homes near highwater, muddy artery that delivers thousands of miles’ sediment into the mouth of blues. The original lazy summer heat, the dried loam awaiting water-raking, and the thunderous sky. Into the onetime Republic of the Lone Star and across its borders into Juarez at night with darkeyed girls with pretty skin and thick hair, and north, of the desert and into flatter windier lands, to the Great Northwest where the Columbia whiles to the steelblue ocean and the sun sets on the Western world. I am going West.
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