American Noise
Boxcars and electric guitars; ospreys, oceans, glaciers, coins; the whisper of the green corn kachina; the hard sell, the fast buck, casual traffic, nothing at all; nighthawks of the twenty-four-hour donut shops; maples inflamed by the sugars of autumn; aspens lilting sap yellow and viridian; concrete communion of the clover leaves and interchanges; psalms; sorrow; gold mines, zydeco, alfalfa, 14th Street; sheets of rain across the hills of Antietam; weedy bundles of black-eyed Susans in the vacant lots of Baltimore; smell of eggs and bacon at Denny’s, outside Flagstaff, 4 A.M.; bindle stiffs; broken glass; the solitary drifter; the sprinklers of suburbia; protest rallies, rocket launches, traffic jams, swap meets; the Home Shopping Network hawking cubic zirconium; song of the chainsaw and the crack of the bat; wheels of progress and mastery; tugboats, billboards, foghorns, folk songs; pinball machines and mechanical hearts; brave words spoken in ignorance; dance music from the Union Hall; knots of migrant workers like buoys among waves or beads in the green weave of strawberry fields around Watsonville; the faithful touched by tongues of flame in the Elvis cathedrals of Vegas; wildflowers and anthracite; smokestacks and sequoias; avenues of bowling alleys and flamingo tattoos; car alarms, windmills, wedding bells, the blues.
—Campbell McGrath
—found in American Noise (1994)