Wild Turkeys

When I was a June twenty-two,

one week fresh from graduation,

I took a flight to Lubbock

and wore cowboy hats with friends

as young and sweet as grass.

One night we put on skirts

and tall boots and ambled through the halls 

of an old restaurant, bourbon and whiskey 

in glasses, all very kin to cigars 

and mustaches, dark with ranch wood.

The stars would be bright, the moon

uncommonly full in that wide sky,

so we stepped outside, a slight chill

wrapping down our boots and around

our ankles, expecting Texas.

Instead, the screams of a child--

two children? more?--broke the twilight,

and I gaped up--up, for they were in the trees, 

perched and wailing at the coming dark,

pleading in a language I couldn't decipher.

“Peacocks,” a man said, amused, thumb in his pocket.

I know because I stared at him in astonishment.

Pressed pants. No belt buckle. Thin tie.

No cowboy hat. Peacocks in trees, their tail feathers

draped extravagantly over limbs like evening

dresses, stars of blue and green and gold,

mad debutantes, filling out the harmony of oil rigs.

That night I removed my boots

and didn’t check for snakes.

And ten years later, while rocking my child

to sleep in a new home, dusk painting

the acre and a half in tree shadows--

all those Minnesota maples and oaks and pines--

my thoughts of twinkling little stars were interrupted

by hysterical laughter, a long throaty gobble--

two gobbles? maybe more?--and, though startled,

I didn’t need a man in a thin tie to tell me to look up.

Look up. Find the spirits in the trees. Open your windows.

Call back to them in the way you now know how.

PS: Happy Earth Day, all.

Hope the sun is shining where you are.