The Neptune Festival

The riders of shoed horses have to stay alert parading along the slippery blacktop.

We love the display, the grand, the robust joy of exhibition; Spanish, French, Mexican:

Texas braggadocios: a squaw dress with rickrack laid out in rows

more orderly than the added-on vernacular of roads and houses,

Old Glory beside the Lone Star; a new shirt with ornate panels and pearl snaps, a handed down

buckle, the crown of a hat creased like no one else’s. Our love of the festival

has lain all year in our cedar chests, has hung safely in the closet.

This is the day of freedom from labor; unless you are a local merchant, run

the filling station, or work in one of the two cafes down town. While some

other parts of the country mourn ancient inhibitions eroded by modernity, we ride together

with the recent and the long dead; we ride with the living and the new, and not yet, born.

Perhaps the first was somewhere on a beach, a locale “Greek”

to me; a prize offered up before a limestone––more familiar––

cliff above the dunes. Myth touts. We––the animals

who can talk––began taming ourselves

long before the feral knife or the shepherd lord.

When I was coming along, there was less sand in the arena

and no “mutton busting.” Here, olive proud Athena

sits on the hard bleachers like everyone else.

These evenings, divinities searching for reconciliation

need only turn to the prayers of unsaddled clowns

or the bright embroidered rowels of wild flowers.