Neil Young would recognize this road,
the pavement unwinding straight ahead, tires humming in tune with the wind.
Kneehill County they call it.
The coulees of the Alberta prairies are home
to gophers, cows, wheat and sky.

I see Thor walk, far off, across a field
where the swell of the land bumps up against the iron sky.
He stops on a hill, no higher than a giant's knee, and commands the storm brewing off to the west.
It is his eternity I see, the story where the sky writes the earth's edge.

Jason Kenny does not live here.
Nor Drake, nor Justin B.
Here in this place where all I can hear is myself shouting to be heard.
And the wind. I hear the wind.
The vista yawns before me, the smell of shit and sun streams across my skin.
On my own, I face myself and nothing stares back.

My grandparents farmed in country like this.
A little further south and east.
It is even flatter there, no knees to bump the horizon.

In a prairie summer, the sun unrolls like saran wrap, melting into the land and skin, fissures and wrinkles coated in a clear plastic haze of heat.
It wraps the earth and the farmer, binding them tight, until,
from a distance,
you are no longer sure of beginnings and endings.

I idolize the prairies.
I am Neil Young driving the roads, heartache riding shotgun by my side.
I am Thor, scanning the horizon for my hammer, the land lost in the sky.
But my ideal self, the me that would stop the car and climb between the strands of barbed wire
to lie in the field, enfold myself into the earth and sky,
that me does not exist.
The me I am presses on the gas and races
to escape the wind.