I guess I never told you about Texas, long and sweet in the evening, boiling jelly, about mom’s temperature, stuck in the oven:
The best and worst part of the Texas was its nights, serenading the broad-backed racial fear of the destiny of men, and some of the women (though they were generally less worried about destiny), and the arch-send-out of the reigning spirits, incandescent over the lives we’d built in our hollow; never enough; never American enough; nor hardly even American, and bent into the wind to see this reason—what reason is it? —what kind of nature could it be to hold us so, spinning as a bright metal top in his hand, and hers: melted over the asphalt.
You never saw us wrenching out the sockets from the street games and startled faces of the hard-worked adults, shaking off their pores into the distance: the black-bottomed arrow-boat of the majesty of years, stuck into the grime and ant-colony waste, a lyrical prison, carefully swept of some of the dangerous sharp objects and casually maintaining some of its others, magical:
We shouldn’t say too much. Shouldn’t wait too long. Shouldn’t mean too much when we say it. (Though I do). Pretend I mean nothing by it, and the return of my hand to yours, just to say hello, or goodbye, is a kind of anchor whose channel is so deep it can hardly be noticed; the earth.
Robin Wyatt Dunn was born in Wyoming in 1979. He is a graduate student in creative writing at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. You can read more of his work at robindunn.com
