| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
HOW WEST TEXAS PULLS THE HIGHWAY’S WINTER COTTON
Matthew Blue
(MinisterJoe)
West Texas winter is farmer faked
when cotton is picked by machine.
Trucks carry bales to the gin,
scraps fly off brown skeletons in the wind.
The drifts build up a mile coming and going
from the co-op. A slow blink on a long drive,
and you will see snow caught under the highway’s
skirt of weeds, and cradled in her ditch, that gully
between the railroad’s hump and electricity’s tits.
They’re going to re-lay the railroad track by I-40
starting in Vernon. The ties are black and tar coated,
ready for a Windsor knot. Every five feet there are three
sticks, sort of bachelor nervous waiting for the girlfriend to come
with a clip-on. That’s how West Texas waits for snow.
Come October and November if you can’t wait,
you can always drive past the caprock, draw your eyes into slits
and see only the highway’s skirt from the backseat.
Push your nose into the cold window—one mile coming,
another mile going, you’ll swear Christmas, and look for Rudolph’s nose
glued to the end of an oil-pump, with Santa,
riding in that field of perpetually nodding steel birds.
When there is a drought, the snow is skinny.
The farmer marks the collection of rows with used tires,
pulls irrigation lines to the edge of his field, and everything waits
for next year. The old telephone lines with their purple glass
hats wait for collectors, their tendons drooped and snapped,
they pout underneath their well-off cousin wires and spit
at the cell phone dishes, that the farmer gets money for,
that spot in his field for the tower.
West Texas winter is better faked. The real stuff is black ice
and blowing drifts—there are no trees except where man put them,
and it’s better to wake up from a backseat dream believing for a second,
you had seen snow pure and pee free. The feedlot’s aroma will break the spell,
and you only think about your DQ hamburger that’s not sitting so well.
Judge John Poch’s comment: “I live in West Texas. But, of course, bad West Texas poems drift around me like so much cotton on a roadside in winter. I appreciate the precision of vision in this poem. That ‘the snow is skinny’ is, to me, surprisingly astute. And there are many more really nice images in the poem. There’s an interesting shift to the second person in the poem that has an air of Richard Hugo. I might have chosen this poem for second place, but there are a few places the poem stumbles. ‘electricity’s tits’?? I don’t mind the phrase, but I’m not exactly sure I see the image or understand its function like I see so much of the rest of the poem. And I have no idea why the stanzas are broken up as they are.”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
Honorable mentions, January 2004
