The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Julie Enszer

IN TEXAS

I am being driven ninety miles an hour from College Station
to Austin on a twisted, two-lane highway. It's pitch black outside.

We drive, and we drive. Then we smell hay.
I don't recognize it, but my travel companions tell me: hay.

They harvest memories from their baling childhoods.
It makes me think of pine and cedar in northern Michigan:

how they smell in August at dusk and dawn
when it is so cold, I need a sweater, and summer days are numbered

when every September brings me closer.
I am lonely. I smell hay. I think of you.


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