Williamson County gloves
My lover sends me cowboy gloves
bought in a county named for me.
The leather is unbroken, musky
as stallion’s flanks. I trace
the smooth edge of each finger,
lay them by me at night: become
a rolling, low, black land, guarded
out west by limestone hills, swathed
in prairie grasses – somewhere
grain and cotton prosper, delicate
but fulsome, blowsy in Atlantic breezes.
My dreams range with a candour I lack
when awake. I lick the leather,
watch the wet darkness linger.
Horizon Review, September 2008
