Country music love affairs

All those years educating my heart

in the lonesome lore

of hopeless dusty towns

and hearts beyond broken.

Records spun by my batchelor uncle

on a wooden-framed player,

uncoiled harder lives like a thrown rope,

never landing.

Another guitar player,

tuning on the empty plain of an expectant stage.

Pinned with a spotlight’s nail,

like a dog’s skull bleached and patient,

on a iron-dry fence post.

The high open country was inside,

and the creak of leather

and the scrape of sand

and the hard slow smoothness of brass before bolt

spoke in the night

as seductive as a snake essing,

across rock hot from a day without mercy.

Desperate complications and taciturn heroes,

silent agreement

that love was a killing crazy kind of choice,

unavoidable as a river ford

or mountain pass.

In the end the songs are true and life lies,

I’ll  listen and live.