Song of the American town
While the perfect American town is filled
With the back-woods bike paths of rural Oregon
And air clean enough to have come down off
The highest Colorado passes
It is a part of those states in only the most passive sense.
The days in this vague place progress quickly
From the cold breezes of early morning’s mists
To a quite regular afternoon
As if the sun itself was corrected
By a thin orange gauge that glows in the evening like a neon pen.
Its closest city is both young and old
Containing more dive bars than chapels
More chapels than churches
More schools than all three
If you count them together.
Seven of ten are educated
Nine of ten are employed
One of ten ride the rails out of town.
When they find themselves lying down in bed here
Even financiers and writers can’t help but grin
At the raw beauty they have been so lucky to find
Then again writers and financiers believe strongly in luck.
On one of its summer’s many warm days
You can look down any exit a few miles
And find silver-laden lakes flowing into ferocious rapids;
waters perfect for any tepid or adventurous soul.
The perfect American town is not some
Tiny collection of wooden shacks on the Arizona border
It’s not some community filled with modern masterpieces
And colonial relics on Connecticut’s gold cost
You couldn’t find it in the warm sun and cool wind
Of it’s wide open windows on wharfs of San Francisco.
The great American town fills the space between those towns,
Those cities,
Our lives.
It is filled with chrome-covered biker gangs
And peanut shells tossed from trucker’s cabs
It is made from tar and yellow and paint
And finds itself more often than not carrying
Some sad soul away from that perfect American town.
The one that failed to be everything it could have been.
Chris Burns Writing 