Images of Love

Chip Dameron

March 12, 2023

Based on Jim Love’s Area Code, a welded steel sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

A bunch of boxes tells how parts 

of Texas make a crazy metal quilt 

of culture: Indian arrow to lug nut 

wrench, javelina to stylized rattler, 

two longhorns to a U-turn. 

Ma and Pa, galvanized fixtures 

in a sly Texas Gothic, anchor 

the squared middle, while pedestaled

on either side are a ten-gallon hat

and an oil well pump jack, silhouettes 

of what people here still worship.

There’s a big bullet hole in one corner

and an American flag in rigid glory,

its stars stranded in barbed wire – 

don’t go tangling with Texans.

For fun, city slickers are offered

a canted bottle with swollen teats,

just ready for milking. Want more?

Then open the door to the safe

and squeeze right on in.

Chip Dameron has published eleven collections of poetry and a travel journal. His poems, as well as his essays on contemporary writers, have appeared in numerous publications in the U.S. and abroad. He is a professor emeritus of English at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he’s also been a Dobie Paisano fellow.