Texas Windmills
Talk to Me
Robert Allen
February 2, 2025
I know exactly why I fell in love.
The sound of your voice entranced my young ear
and I loved listening. Over the phone, late
at night—remember what we talked about?
I don’t, anymore. There’s a squeaking sound
a windmill makes, like the one on the farm
where Dad was raised. A big round water tank
stood next to it, and the blades of its fan
were always turning, always producing
that distinctive noise as it powered the pump
that sucked the water up, a sound both strange
and familiar, echoing like your voice,
though now I suppose I’ve offended you
again, and sadly not for the last time.
Sometimes I wish you’d tell me a story.
Maybe you’ve always told fabulous tales
and as you say, either I don’t listen
or I hear them only selectively.
Okay, then. Don’t talk to me. We’ll just keep
doing what we’ve been doing: I will pen
my bad love poem and you will crochet
a Santa’s load of afghans—or we could
taste the air and see which way the wind blows.
Robert Allen lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, two cats, and five antique clocks. His poems have appeared in Voices de la Luna, Texas Poetry Calendar, di-verse-city, and TPA. He loves cardio-boxing, hates throwing things away, and facilitates the in-person Open Writers Lab at Gemini Ink.
Exurban Wind Turbine
Chip Dameron
July 28, 2024
Rotating clockwise,
three slow blades harvest the wind
as if it were time.
Chip Dameron’s latest book, Relatively Speaking, is a shared collection with Betsy Joseph. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he’s also been a Dobie Paisano fellow.
Two Windmill Poems
Clarence Wolfshohl
July 7, 2024
The Evening Wind Up
Sometimes, usually in the second
or third inning, unless Beaumont
or Ft. Worth—whoever the Missions
were playing—had a big first,
the Coastal breeze would reach
us on the southern edge of the Balcones,
and it would be time.
My father and I would be sitting
outside under the mesquite, listening
to Jim Wiggins broadcast Mission games.
The sun was just a slit of orange
and the heat of the day was confused
in the darkening sky, and then
the breeze would slowly sift in.
My signal to unleash the windmill.
I’d wrestle the 2x6 brake lever,
and the vanes would start a slow rotation.
About then Bobby Balcena would step
to the plate, and the pitcher would go into
his wind-up as the Aeromotor’s rudder caught
the wind and the sucker rods began drawing.
Elegant Energy
Wind Farm at McCamey, Texas
Hundreds of elegant towers sleek
against mesa rimmed sky
curve silence.
Propellers turn
in stately ponder.
Fifty years ago these hills
sat in smell of oil
like bad manners noticed
only by strangers driving through.
Walking beams hunkered low,
pistons keeping Earth’s engine afire.
Black monotony of pumping
like maniacal birds at richness edge.
Now, these towers stand
high to catch western wind,
hum a cosmic chant
as if free of gravity and set
on galactic exploration–
giant propellers spinning out fire
to lift Earth into the air.
Native of San Antonio, Clarence Wolfshohl has been active in the small press as writer and publisher for sixty years. More recently he has published in Southwest American Literature, The Mailer Review, New Texas, New Letters, and Texas Poetry Assignment.
Hometowns
Milton Jordan
June 30, 2024
The windmill and the water-tank
Still stand on solid ground.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore
Usually in autumn we head back to town,
still well beyond Houston’s sprawling reach,
and stay, as always, in unit eighteen
at the east end of Blanchard’s Travelers Rest,
though few travelers still use this route.
Our first view cresting the rise from the southeast
slowly turning blades on the town windmill,
once, with its matching sister on the west end,
the primary water source for our hometown
now long served by the LCRA.
Blanchard’s oldest nephew, Scott, who’s run
the Travelers Rest for a dozen years,
says he had thought he’d outlast those rusting blades
but warned us this year we’d best consider
a freeway motel next October.
Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He co-edited the first Texas Poetry Assignment anthology, Lone Star Poetry, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022.
Tilting
Jim LaVilla-Havelin
June 30, 2024
it will fall soon
one day, it felt like out of nowhere,
the stalk rose from the sharp-edged mandala
that is agave
rose to propogate and die
blossoms atop it, whirligig wonder
mixed feelings - it will fall soon
and be gone
but on its way to dying -
flamboyant, joyous
she says, it looks like something
out of Dr. Seuss, and I’m remembering
Thidwick’s commodious antlers
and Gary gives it back its name, tureng
word for it - quiote
which seems quite perfect to me
that knight on horseback, followed
closely by Sancho, on burro
tilting at windmills - Quixote
become a metaphor for futility
when maybe, really, just a vegetable dream
to be transformed into
white metal bladed giants, turning in
the wind, along the Gulf Coast and
deep into the Valley
Jim LaVilla-Havelin is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent, Tales from the Breakaway Republic, a chapbook, was published by Moonstone Press, Philadelphia, in May 2022. LaVilla-Havelin is the Coordinator for National Poetry Month in San Antonio.
A Texas Whirligig Memoir
Jan Seale
June 30, 2024
From the plane window she sees the wind machines,
turbines lined against the sky rising from the patchwork quilt
of Rio Grande farms, giant three-winged toys
dancing by command or lolling in the Gulf breeze.
And the clank-duhduh-clank of a childhood windmill
eight hundred miles north, still in Texas, this time
out on the Caprock, comes on her screen.
It’s night and the girl is only half asleep when
her aunt’s voice comes clear, “George,
get up and go turn off that windmill!”
It seems the chattering metal of the splayed-out
pinwheel, so necessary by day for the wash,
the garden, the thirst-slaking of animals
has been left in the ON position.
Now the night wind has cancelled out
the summer day and the farmer’s windmill
has succumbed to a dark insistent charm:
water happily spilling over the tank,
intent on miring the girl’s swing set below.
Precious water must be saved.
Something must be done.
A small oath bleeps from the bedroom
(the girl knows she is not supposed to hear it).
Bedsprings squeak, boots moan,
and a giant clomps through the hall. The girl knows
the uncle will bang wide the kitchen door,
march across the yard to the windmill, pull the chain,
magically closing off the water from deep down,
the water no more slopping over the side of the tank.
So the string of memory is threaded, from preparing
to land on the Texas coast among the giant winged towers,
to lowering 70 years ago to the Texas Panhandle,
a girl listening, listening all the way across Texas,
all the way across time and circumstance,
the wind making itself known on giant rotor blades
that travel the highways, mount towers, twist—
as it were—in the wind, fulfill their electrical destiny;
the wind skipping across giant Texas to the whirligigs
huffing icy water from deep aquifers.
And long-ago girls listen to the clank-duhduh-clank,
then, hearing nothing, drift into sleep, knowing
their swing sets, and they, are safe come morning.
Jan Seale lives in deep South Texas. She has authored nine poetry volumes as well as books in fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature. She is the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate.
The Wind Pump
Vincent Hostak
June 30, 2024
Gusting across a flat, dry plain,
a design unbroken until El Capitan’s rise,
and having reached the Place of the Late Sunset,
the wind looks for a spot to rest.
“Cast your burden here, there’s plenty of room”
say the vanes of a lone wind pump.
It is a lie, there’s no rest to be found here.
You must always work to draw the water,
pierce the pores to find the long-lost lakes.
The next tallest structure is a retired reef,
a clash of copper against persistent blue,
the ancient work of creatures, minute and tender,
layered into throngs in the sea.
The land works deep into dusk:
scree scuttles down a beveled crest,
it joins the pulse of this whirling time.
With creaking blades and aeolian sigh,
the wind pump heaves into its second shift.
Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.