M. Walker is an Austin based artist, musician, and writer from Amarillo, TX.
The high plains is an ocean of grass that comes by degree. You cannot receive it all at once. You may drive and drive, and the land will keep its face turned, holding secret its changes, hiding the stunning features you could not imagine, until you have earned your way through the distance and you see it for yourself. It demands the kind of attention that can only manifest when you slow down.
The grass there is tall. It bends, thins, breaks, returns. It carries sound before sight, animals moving somewhere inside. The faint seam of insects stitching the air. Dust held down without complaint until the day warms and everything cuts loose. And as the sun puts on a show, what felt so solid before dissolves bit by bit by bit.
Wind in the fencewire, a thin metallic singing. The posts lean in to listen to it. A highway far off, sound arriving late and stretched out. A semi passes and leaves a long low smear behind it, charcoal dragged across paper.
A water tank on a bluff, sun-bleached, paint chalky. The ladder rattles in the gusts. Somewhere below, clicks and rasps keeping time. Dust lifts in slow sheets through a porch light, the air visible only because of it. Our mouths taste of it. Our tongues learn the day. At night the insects swell until they are the whole room, their incessant sound becomes ceiling, then the floor, then the weather outside and the burning inside our ribs.
As a kid I thought the land was empty. I did not know what it held until I had grown and gone away. Grass heads knocking together. A lowing beyond the fence line, slow enough to feel like oncoming dark weather. A creekbed dry as bone, cracked mud holding the print of something that came to drink and left. You step near it and the ground gives a little, as if it remembers water by softness. A rattlesnake reminds you she is there and to fuck off.
At dusk, horizon turns violet, sky melon and cotton candy, and the land exhales. The last light sits on the tips of the stalks and every blade stands at final attention. You can feel the receipt of it. A gate with a chain looped once, not locked, only weighted. You lift it and it gives a little creak, then swings open. The note hangs and is carried away.
There is a compressed quiet to the Panhandle. Sound travels and decays and disappears. You learn to listen for what lasts. Palo Duro in heat, the red walls bright enough to feel behind the eyes. Down there sound behaves differently, shorter, held close to ancient stone. You speak and the words come back in altered states. Back on the Caprock the sky returns drifted clouds to playa lakes and the light changes without advance notice. The land keeps its measurements without your permission or god’s.
A radio between stations. Static, then a sliver of song, then more static. The hand reaches, hesitates, then leaves it there. The hiss is a companion on lonely stretches.
These pieces were not written to describe that place, but they come from it all the same. The pacing. The long lines. The repetitions with slight changes, trying again under different light. I hear the grasslands in the spaces between notes more than in the notes themselves. Nothing here is meant to resolve. The ground I grew up on rarely does. It holds, releases, burns, and returns. That is sufficient.