Poetry, cont’d from page 4
S PRIGGS B OOT & S ADDLE
Repair • Tack • Jewelry • Rodeo
Motorcycle Gear • Gifts and more!
We ship anywhere
608 1/2 E Holland Ave. • Alpine
(432) 837-5000
Alpine Gas Stations Cactus Flowers
Adobe walls, adorned by sculptural plants lining a patio
once selling gas, then food, now furnishings We will live in the Sunday house
for sale, reduced, two bedrooms, one bath
a set of four dishes
but many glasses, mostly with stems
nodding at cowboys in pickups, first hesitantly
then with practiced ease
Lime-green station, fitted with a stone waterfall, herbs, flow-
ers
and hanging wood signs – Fine Woodworking and For
Sale
Pastel flower shop posting: Open and Please Call Again,
bouquets not for sale; a lonely pottery swan left at the pumps
Deserted, decaying building – windows boarded up,
no coffee, no snacks and no fill-ups
A patriotic station flagging drivers down,
gas on both sides and tacos in between
READ US ONLINE!
www.cenizojournal.com
A shiny turquoise and white Harley proudly on display,
adding color to the otherwise bland, major-brand station
Two straight, one-way streets, in and out of town,
homes for stations – repurposed, practical and waiting.
– Christine Wenk-Harrison
Certain images showed up again and again in
the poems we wrote, like a vintage motorcycle, the
Bien Venido Motel, “for sale” signs, stucco and
squash. Some students focused largely on plant
life, some on buildings and shops, some on colors,
one on the cats encountered along the way:
Cats & Colors
Music To Your Ears
CDs • DVDs • Vinyl
Games • Special Orders
Quilts
Etc.
by
Mon-Fri 10-6
203 E Holland Ave, Alpine
Marguerite
Made in the Big Bend
432.837.1055 HWY 118 • Terlingua
ringtailrecords@sbcglobal.net 432.371.2292
3/4 mile N of HWY 170
I stepped from the Holland
wearing new eyes beneath
an oil-painted Renoir sky –
thick brush-strokes of blues,
film noir grays and whites.
Cloud-shadows crept across
backdrop mountains and rolled
onto the awakening streets.
My stroll past galleries, bars, shops
coated by a palette of vivid colors
revealed the town’s cats napping
secure in their shaded nooks –
quiet creatures content, waiting
for Alpine to liven up their morning.
– Travis Blair
I was totally encouraged when I noticed that
most of the students had two or more pages of
notes after only one block. But the people of
Alpine took notice too. Cars stopped in the mid-
dle of the street to ask us what we were up to.
Store owners came out of their shops to see what
we were looking at. The few people we met out
on the streets were curious and encouraging, even
the skateboarders. We felt that we had indeed cre-
ated a scene in Alpine!
A couple of students from Austin used their
notes to create poems that expanded on the real-
ity of the street, but definitely used the sights and
sounds of Alpine to do so. Murphy McBride took
the specifics to imagine a life of her own in
26
Alpine, while a fiction writer in the class used the
panes of glass in Video City to envision high
school life in Alpine:
Cenizo
Second Quarter 2012
You will bring your banjo
I will bring a soft twang to my voice
We’ll go to Harry’s Tinaja
“All pickers welcomed”
They will ask us to play another one
not because we are so talented
but because they are so kind
In our own garden
climbing squash and gum beans
dancing the two-step
with men in pressed jeans at the Paisano
riding our restored turquoise and white Harley
through the sere hills
living as open as cactus flowers
all our colors for everyone to see
– Murphy McBride
6 Panes
Traffic swooshes and brakes click by.
Small town anywhere sounds.
Video City closed, Netflix-ruined.
Lights out behind the windows reveal
White paint on six panes faintly sprayed.
Like stenciling for Christmas decorations.
Paint rubbed away by teenage fingers.
“Michael + _____” “Sarita is _______”.
Later cooled fingers returned to erase.
Where is Sarita? Was she cute, mean, pretty, fat?
Who is Michael with now? Who had been erased?
The whip arc of a teenage relationship.
Erased before the paint even dried?
In my day boys gave girls big silver ID bracelets.
In the morning before school.
After pondering the lightning strike all night.
Full intentions of marrying someday.
Took them back or had them flung at them by day’s end.
Temporary. Temporal. Tempo.
– Reba Saxon
It’s amazing what you can notice if you take the
time to look – and we did. The walk through
Alpine provided enough source material for sever-
al poems, far too much for one 14-line poem (and,
indeed, students have sent me a number of poems
in addition to the “walking sonnet” that came out
of the morning’s notes). Whitman claimed,
“Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,” and we
found the miracle of poetry in every step along
Holland Avenue. As we stopped to take notes and
write lines along the eight-block stretch, we sepa-
rated, some of us taking two and a half hours to
walk just 14 blocks! Among the last to finish – and
by this point it was hot – were Ramona Tepper
and myself, and I wonder if the extended summer
heat affected our choice of subjects: