Morning Poem

This morning I walked miles of trails in the South Austin woods, through thicket and tall grass.  Clouds brought cover as the dog and I sought out trails in the mid-morning haze.  My boyfriend and I are house sitting this week for a good family friend- the garage apartment is like a little cottage, soft bed and solid wood ceiling, curved upward like the ribs of a barn.  Guthrie and the little dog Bouta played this morning, I drank coffee from a borrowed cup and relaxed in the backyard, marveling at the quiet, the trees standing at attention along the fence line, the much needed break in the routine of the last few months.  I picked up a book of poems from The Writer's Almanac, and found this.

In Texas

by May Sarton

In Texas the lid blew off the sky a long time ago

So there's nothing to keep the wind from blowing

And it blows all the time. Everywhere is far to go

So there's no hurry at all, no reason for going.

In Texas there's so much space words have a way

Of getting lost in the silence before they're spoken

So people hang on a long time to what they have to say;

And when they say it the silence is not broken,

But it absorbs the words and slowly gives them

Over to miles of white-gold plains and gray-green hills,

And they are part of the silence that outlives them.

Nothing moves fast in Texas except windmills

And the hawk that rises up with a clatter of wings.

(Nothing more startling here then sudden motion,

Everything is so still.) But the earth slowly swings

In time like a great swelling never-ending ocean,

And the houses that ride the tawny waves get smaller

As you get near them because you see them then

Under the whole sky, and the whole sky is so much taller

With the lid off than a million towers built by men.

After a while you can only see what's at horizon's edge,

And you are stretched with looking so far instead of near,

So you jump, you are startled by a blown piece of sedge;

You feel wide-eyed and ruminative as a ponderous steer.

In Texas you look at America with a patient eye.

You want everything to be sure and slow and set in relation

To immense skies and earth that never ends. You wonder why

People must talk and strain so much about a nation

That lives in spaces vaster than a man's dream and can go

 Five hundred miles through wilderness, meeting only the hawk

And the dead rabbit in the road. What happens must be slow,

Must go deeper even than hand's work or tongue's talk,

Must rise out of the flesh like sweat after a hard day,

Must come slowly, in its own time, in its own way.