old cowboy in city

 

chapped stars, and a sickle-celled moon over the wide prairie

of his boyhood, where the cows are longhorned and led across the southwest

by side-spitting, bow-legged men who smell of saddle-grease and

dust, and dried sweat, and dust. where the thunderheads grow like white lies

and the desert flowers gather in the tiniest yellow orphanages

     their heads hanging, like dangling participles.

when he would sit in a red pickup, disciple of the unborn day, listening,

as the sun would crack over the horizon like an adolescent voice, smelling

cigarette smoke, thermosed coffee, and the ushered, blushing scent

of cattle-dung. he eats his breakfast with the other cow-hands �" they are silent

in the blue, as the night is dusted off of the heirloom day, and the sky

creaks open overhead, and the cows think heavy, dream-dense thoughts.

in their ghosttowns, the stars are forgotten

like loose change and buttons at

      the bottom of a drawer.

he thinks of these New Mexican mornings on nights like this, when he can't

sleep in his bed in the city, his old hands traced and retraced with the forgotten

deer-trails and landmarks of age. he thinks of the time that they hunted a she-wolf

that was killing cattle for the four months of winter, and when they finally caught her.

yellow eyes of the demon host, and the gummed up mash of her paw in a

trap. he watched her, squatting in front of her for hours, her swollen tits

hanging and hooping from her underside, and for those hours,

he stared into the eyes of the end of the world and

       never went back.

he thinks

of the sistine chapel of a setting sun, the rays of perishing sunlight fanning out

like adam's desperate fingers. of sleeping on hard ground, of dying with your

boots on, of the mexican girls with their dark eyes and their dark, fumbling hands,

of a shared cigarette, of the springbirds among the cacti, small and uttered,

       like lovers' nicknames.

he sleeps in a hospital gown with a pair of false snakeskin boots near the bedside

table and a cowboy hat worn and salted with sweat and sun-shrunk. he would

die for a cigarette and a shot of whiskey, and one last night on the plains,

falling asleep by an open fire, whose ditties of sparks cast skyward, and the west

        glows red, a bored heart,

and hushes.