Welcome Cedar Park Opry House
declares the sign
astride the ruts between
blocks of mobile homes
a windless banner
thrust on the rim of a raw planet.
I can’t see it
(squatting hard against the lime-bitter ground
maintaining the barest hold
behind the self-service filling station).
Two old hawk faces
perch on the sharp sills
in the aluminum hut.
They know where the Opry House is.
But I am blinded
by the gold
buttressing the hills.
Sandra Lynn (1944—2013) was born in Longview, Texas, studied at the University of Texas, and received her masters in English from the University of California at Berkeley. She published one full-length collection of poetry: I Must Hold These Strangers (Prickly Pear Press, 1980), from which these poems were excerpted, and contributed poems to the travel photography book Where Rainbows Wait for Rain: The Big Bend Country (Tangram Press, 1989). She moved to New Mexico in 1988, and was a Professor of English for fifteen years, first at University of New Mexico, and later at New Mexico State University: Carlsbad. Her last book, Windows on the Past: Historic Lodgings of New Mexico, is a history and travel guide to New Mexico's historic hotels (University of New Mexico Press, 1999). Prickly Pear Press also included her work in the anthologies Washing the Cow’s Skull (1981) and Three Texas Poets (1986).
