On Staked Plains: ‘Until the Wind is a River no more…’

The “Llano Estacado” - Staked Plains - is the name affixed by the Conquistadors to an unquenchable western vastness. They were far from empty plains. Andy Wilkinson’s song-poem conjures some of its spirit(s)…

The wind is the oldest river, rhythmic,
Unceasing, infinite, the pulse of God.
Where time is the blood in which tghe Lano
is washed, where the horizon is the line
Cut from foreever by tghe eddies
Of this current, spinning and swriling
On the nether edge of sight, patient as starlight,
There we ride like Coronado, his breath
At our backs and our eyes screwed to his dreams
Of shining cities floating over the prairie.
There, like Quanah Parker, we are waves
On this river, riding ponies like fishes,
Sleek, quick, nimble. And, like Goodnight,
There we ride with the wind in our faces
Until we find its roots, until the last
Gust lies still and settled on the fences,
Until the wind is a river no more. \

Andy Wilkinson
Horseback on the Llano Estacado
2002