Texas Moon?

Jeffrey L. Taylor

June 4, 2023

The moon over Texas
looks remarkably like
the moon over Nashville,
over California.

It’s the framing sky
that is unique.

The sky can mislead, but not for long.
Sierra Nevada’s summer thunderstorms
resemble Texas’s anywhere, anytime
thunderheads. Nashville’s thunderheads
are neither as tall nor as long lasting,
and mostly only when it rains.

Texas sunsets are either clear blue sky
or orange retreating up
mountains of clouds.

Nashville sunsets are layered,
shades of orange, peach, coral over blue,
crisscrossed with contrails,
sharp, windblown, diffuse.

San Francisco sunsets,
best after the sun sets:
orange glow through the Golden Gate,
intense green over the Marin Headlands
shading upwards to zenith blue.

It’s the frame that’s unique.

Jeffrey L. Taylor's first submitted poems won 1st place and runner-up in Riff Magazine's 1994 Jazz and Blues Poetry Contest.  Encouraged, he continues to write and has been published in di-vêrsé-city, The Perch, Gathering Storm Magazine, Red River Review, Illya's Honey, Enchantment of the Ordinary anthology, Texas Poetry Calendar, and The Langdon Review.  Serving as sensei (instructor) to small children and professor to graduate students has taught him humility.