I'll Be Home For Solstice

Texas is a wild country,
The edges of an imagined frontier.
The sky can smother you in its vastness.
You cling to the earth
Lest you tumble upward to its infinity.

Texas conceals nothing,
Reaching to eternities.
Stand on a hill and you own the world.
Watch the roads and plains fade gray at their edges,
Daring you to chase them.

The air is a furnace blast.
Sun is king and lord over these bleached lands.
In winter he rests,
Lets his enemies flirt with conquest,
While the biting ice advances from the north,
Never given much domain.

To return at the year's end is to be newly overwhelmed,
To find pecan and mesquite and oak,
Catfish and magenta thunder,
Bluebonnets like graffiti,
The sky curdled with every shape and color,
Nights lit by little lights,
Strings and lamps and streetlights,
Quiet mornings and dark afternoons,
Church paraphernalia sprinkled over us like seasoning.

To return is to fantasize,
To remember that while you wandered,
Texas grew stranger, forgetting you.

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Photo by Leaflet