Leaving West Texas, September 2012
Angling westward over rectangles of brown,
the word brown is not brown enough.
What’s below these wings looks abandoned
by color, left to bake and raked with scars
we came and made, the scraped half circles
in the already-tired dirt, the wells and windmills
heaving and bending or swinging wide arms.
It’s not my country.
My mother, tiny, hurried through the difficult
revolving airport doors into the dusty light
of late day, blue eyes averted, hiding tears.
If my chest were not stretched to aching
like a water balloon I would be weeping too,
but my anguish is not for airports, it’s not about
that punctuated parting that is lived and relived
a few times a year with bags and hurrying.
No, I am holding everything I hope to never feel and know I will,
seeing her smaller, more confused and oddly frail,
this woman who was once invincible,
or so it seemed. I watch her hold in everything
that she won’t be telling me, the things the neighbors
tell me anyway. My mother, always sheltering her cub.
I see it despite all she tries to hide, I see her eyes.
An airport parting—that can’t touch me now.
So temporary, in the face of things.
