[sense of place]
PRAIRIE PANORAMA By Michael Ogden
The first shot is a tractor glinting in the sun, running to make more lined grooves. It is all saccade, the shadows move on, quick and delivered from an outside edge of visual awareness. Golden wheat fields and stark blue ponds at 60 miles per hour all day long while driving to jobs. The scream of churning drills and the drone of steel motors belching diesel. Men dwarfed like mice in the light of towering oil derricks that pop up like cities in the night. Then it’s on to the next rig in the eerie glow of halogen. It is a flurry of essence and the soft oily things in the patch are memories that fade with every new mile gone. Glowing orange haze horizon black Promethean landscape echo. Dinosaur blood, sulfur, crustaceans Pump jack dipping down! back up, down. Oil. Black gold, clean wheat radiating spica. Flat great drain tops ocean basin, layered lines receding pool. Oil.
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