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 |
