"1st Place Winner of the Open Community Poetry Contest for the period January 1-March 31, 2012."--ed.
Wilson drives the day labor
with coded directives of the same hand
he uses to correct the horses
with help from a two-by-four.
Those of us who understand him:
a sun-bitten fourth generation West Texan,
continue to craft tax shelters
for the man in the sprawling spread
up from the valley, down from the hill.
Come sundown, the workers go about
with whatever entertainments can be mustered,
while Wilson sticks his arm;
trying to escape the Saudi sun and sands
of a place few of us Gentiles know,
or can scarcely pronounce.
The horse he rides gallops back to a day
when still he had a brother,
and the preferred hand
to trace words upon and
caress the flesh of lovers.
