I've always loved crossing state lines. When one January a great-aunt I never knew passed away in Maine, my mother asked me to help drive from New Jersey to South Dakota for the June memorial service (it's hard to bury people in South Dakota in January), there was no hesitation. I'd never been to South Dakota.

South Dakota rolls
a little more than North
Dakota where
prairie and plain and driver's eye extend to the edge of the earth
and

In South Dakota sunset
even Badlands take on color,
yielding crumbled prairie soil
to yestereon's
worn Jurassic yellow,
red Devonian shales,
Ordovician blue
Revealing signs of life in time
To the patient tourist's eye.

The service was in Rapid City, which is 'way west in South Dakota, near the Black Hills and the Badlands - and the Wyoming state line. (In the west, 'near' is a relative term. My brother thinks nothing of driving six hundred miles from his home in Nebraska to visit his daughter in Missouri.) Crossing that particular state line changed my life. I fell in love with Wyoming.

Each high plain abbutted
by a mountain range,
each mountain range extended
in a panorama to the plains.

A two-dimensional state.