The mountains off in the distance look so close you feel like you can almost reach out and touch them
and there is no such thing as air or light pollution to obscure the stars and the sky.
As a matter of fact, in my new, small part of the world,
I haven’t even seen a plane fly overhead and that somehow seems right.
As the early afternoon settles to dusk I take notice of three telephone poles
and their proximity to the front porch makes them appear taller than the mountains themselves.
As it gets darker, they begin to shrink and the silhouettes they cast
begin to remind me of the three crosses at Calvary
and all I am left with are my thoughts, as random as the stars
and a thin sliver of the moon rising in front of me.
The wind is picking up here in the middle of the Texas desert
with gusts approaching forty or fifty miles an hour
and even though the dust it carries stings my eyes and clouds my nostrils
I feel like I can see and breathe more clearly than I have done in a long, long time.