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Transmotion                                                       Vol 1, No 1 (2015) 
 
 

	
   76	
  

KANSAS 
        DIANE GLANCY 

According to [the physicist, Richard] Feynman, a system has 
not just one history but every possible history— 

THE GRAND DESIGN, Stephen Hawking 
 

There is land and sky and the car passing between them making a small rip in the  
passage as it goes.  The moving car unzips the sky from the land.   I remember  
this as a child.  The oppressive life in my house opened to the land. 
 
In the early days, we traveled from Kansas City to my grandparent’s farm near  
Fulton.  Then my father was transferred to packing houses across the great plains.   
Slaughter houses they were called.  The cattle entered and were killed.  1. The  
cutting off.  2. The slitting of sky from land. 
 
It was a hollow place between parents.  3. Feudal and 4. futile.  The starkness of  
their lives.  The land.  The sky. The grass between them. 
 
My moving life continued moving when my father’s transfers continued—  5.  
Kansas City, 6. Indianapolis, 7. St. Louis, 8. Reading, 9. Kansas City, 10. St.  
Joseph, 11. Denver, 12. Chicago, 13. Sioux City.    
 
My great ship of exploration was a moving van.  14. Atlas.  15. Mayflower.   
 
I had more than one beginning.  I have travels from multiple beginnings.  16. 17.  
18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 
 
Kansas is named after an Indian tribe.  The name means 31. people of the wind,  
though I remember hearing it also meant 32. blue smoke from Indian campfires on  
the prairie.  Kansas became a state in 1861. 
 
In travel, I become the moving place that distance is.  Driving the land has every  
possible history encamped in rock and stone and soil and voices smack against the  
windshield.  Smackie.  Smackie.  
 
Have I ever known who I am—  but in the placement of thought in travel?  Travel  
is the establishment of a moving place so I can’t be swallowed by storms that  
thunder.  I can be 33. one place, then 34. another.  
 
Travel is a map of connections.  A group of correlations in the (t)rip.  My mother  
was born in Hume, Missouri on the Missouri / Kansas border.  My father was  
born in Viola, Arkansas and died in Sioux City, Iowa.  The moving car exhumes  
the past.  It is a travel of associations.  35. Exhaust and 36. exhumation. 37.  
Pastward and 38. forward to every possible future—