The Microcosm of Texas; The Lone Star Sestina

When I close my eyes, I swear I feel everything rising and falling in Texas

as if my head rested on the broad, sleeping chest of a couched dragon;

the thunder is itself the deep,  a rumbling growl from beyond soft scales,

a stone block dragged across cement swallowed by an echoing belly; the Night

is one continuous breath, drawing everything in, even the wailing of a train hiding

just beyond the horizon, and watching the day rising the way a fox acutely eyes

a hapless calf.  The trees rise and the hills rise like the green rinds of watery eyes;

the wildflowers haughtily shrug  off the weighty hooves of sun—I am in Texas—

half in winter, half in spring, tiny scrawling mysteries exposed and yet hidden

and rising among the thrushing, feral hills, the vertebrae of a dragon;

the cindery jowls of the day drip thin lashes of warm smoking into the night

like the glistening descent of minor scales;

the vast blue bulwark close enough to reach out and palm, to scale

should proud hands grip the first cloud and in a head-back stare meet the sun’s eyes 

whose pupils are quiet as the dark dance of truth, the shadows of the night;

the rusty hillocks the virescent knolls, the widening irises of Texas

at once outside of the cave of the great sleep-sighing Earth, dragon,

and yet inside next to its heart, the softest spot of its hide.

When I open my eyes, the full sun falls down on the leathering, hacked hide

of a slain mythos, off the beaten backs of cave-workers balancing harvested scales

on their shoulders, down on the bony hills decaying like teeth in the jaw of a dragon

long laid dead, the endless breath of  acidic war having boiled away its eyes—

this is how the sun falls when I am in Texas—

dead, like all its ancient sisters, in the blind swill of an eternally fallen night

the bold heart falling and the clear mind falling together like the Night’s

lashes falling from bucolic ideations (also dead), as determined thieves hide

their fled footsteps from the unblinking eye of Texas,

itself as chimerical as the organic balance of Justice, their praetorian scales

tipping for the existing order thoroughly entrenched like burning salt in teary eyes,

for the bureaucratic binds as difficult to uncover as the fossilized bones of a dragon,

holy dragon,

for the militant gentry and their thoughtless slayers, black knights

and other tincan machinations of war, for the piles of trash and plucked eyes

and fallen bees choked on the plasticine lies of Monsanto legally hiding

amongst the wilting truths, for the stunted bud scales

and the fecal brown hills of moneyed, moneyed Texas

oil, exports meant to line the leather wallets made from the hides

of kirin, dragons, quetzals, and nymphs, the eyes of Americans pondering the scale

of the heist and calling for the knights to defend microcosmic Texas.

by: L. Raymond Andrews

http://www.totalfilm.com/features/the-making-of-the-hobbit-the-desolation-of-smaug