Night Travel Through West Texas
Jeanie Sanders
July 23, 2023
You are on a straight West Texas road
going somewhere late at night.
The stars seem so close and bright that
as you go over the next hill you
think they might be laying on the highway.
Like the Universe fell from the sky
to light your way to some exceptional place.
No jackrabbit dashes into your headlights.
No coyote’s reflective golden eyes shine.
The remoteness of any life makes you
feel solidarity. Music crackles in and out
over the radio. Jumping in static from
evangelical to Western swing. Abruptly,
as though he were traveling with you,
a mariachi singer’s soulful song of love
comes over the airwaves. You don’t need
to know all the words to know his is a sad love
as plaintively and soothingly “mi amore” is sung out
breathlessly circling the stars.
The evangelist fights his way onto the radio again
telling you in a deep drawl by what means
you can be saved. Proclaiming, even though you
are on a road traveling miles from grace, that
you can still send that love offering and
receive a free vial of water from the River Jordan.
Two very diverse appeals to the heart.
The full moon rises in the middle of the curved road
as alive and round as though it had the capacity to
suddenly bounce down the highway. As under its
reflecting light you move into an early
West Texas morning.
Jeanie Sanders is a poet and collage artist. She lives in Lytle, Texas. Her poems have been published in The Texas Observer, San Antonio Express-News, Texas Poetry Calendar, Passager, La Voz de Esperanza, and several anthologies. She has two books of poetry, The Book of the Dead: Poems and Photographs and The Dispossessed.
