Recuerdos de Tejas

Tejas, te extrano todo mis dias. Here lies a late-night sentiment to my friends back home.


I miss you.

I miss those hot, sweaty
dirty Texas nights
Boots stomping on sawdust floors
Singing songs in the graveyard
Fireflies till morning,
mosquitoes all day long.
It was coffee, breakfast, music;
then biking to the river,
to ease the stifling summer upon our skin.

In the evenings we'd drink tequila
and go out dancing,
Singing heartily along with our friends
in half a dozen languages.

Later still we'd wander off
on some latent adventure
Or fill a room with smoke
as we nursed a whiskey bottle
And piece by piece,
after all those years
my soul came pouring out
in vast channels which flooded my sight
But you,
with grace and tact,
became the valley which calmed the roil
Your voice and your eyes
were the eddies in which the deluge pooled,
sighed,
rested a while.
When the moon had all
but disappeared,
you reached out your hand
and pulled me from those yawning depths.

And so I find the hours imbued
with the echoes of your memory
The sun charts its path across the sky
and I recall so vividly
the light upon us, day or night
That crackling spark

O god...
and the flowering pink crepe myrtles.
And the shade of the fig tree.
A haze of smoke rising from the patio.
Hidden in shadows,
when first we looked upon each other again
Beyond the storm,
in that moment
I could not remember ever having lost you.