Despite My Tired Feet
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Pick-up cowboys round up the street the bars hang over.
Rodeo wound up bull-legged bronc-busters make the bell from their stools.
The band at the bar plays spin the bottle.
"Another round!", cries the crowd-of-a-man with a gut-of-a-laugh.
His words send the cigarette smoke and cowboys a whirlin'.
Like moths the pretty girls flutter 'round.
Passing in an' out, they dart about like tropical fish skipping school.
A woman wearing age in her make-up, a cigarette drooping from her lips, strums a guitar in memory of...
Her crackling voice swears life's a chance; so dance!
And so they do:
High-heeled camaraderie,
broad-rim hats to boot,
sweet-smelling feminine parts in a play out west,
a ballad of a Saturn-day/night,
sung to the tune of a broken beauty,
performed by a crowd of settlers,
steered by a bartender,
re-membered by an I,
absolved.
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Tumbleweed Sun-day:
square fenced,
a patch of abandoned no man's land,
rolls end over end, end to end, a Cross, (with the wind right behind it).
Its trees stand up, and for
nothing
save perhaps to dare the wind to knock them down.
Its light dismisses Saturday's bright colours.
Sunday's a mixture of bland, dirty browns, faded greens.
A pale yellow film of light clings to a blue-grey Mass like attic dust.
The sky depresses up and out as snow flurries round the mountain tops.
Clouds hunch together and brood,
hatching ravens,
lewd and lascivious.
Its morning runs into afternoon.
Its intercourse produces evening.
"And night will be here soon!", reflect the ravens,
cawing the owl's reprieve.
Through a pair of blue jeans flapping, drying on the line, the air chants a funeral dirge for re-creation.
Horses run an' whinny like they do before a storm. They run an' whinny. They run. They whinny.
The strain bores through its mountain rock and splits its very atoms.
Molten chunks of liquid earth spin off.
Its hard an' iron core remains-
heavy-
it travels through the stellar crowds of space.
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One duck dips, splashes spring run-off over its head, rears up, its wings whip, then water beads down its feathers back into the ditch.
Starlings, in flight and fight over spilled grain near the barn and sheep, finished feeding, standing, bleating for more, squawk.
My feet are tired.
A cow calls her calf to a full bag.
Encrusted snow confined to shade crouches ever lower as earth turns towards the sun.
Through brown, green-bottomed grass pressed in mats the snow flows underground.
Mud oozes up from under my tired feet.
A cow calls her calf to a full bag.
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Like a winter evening past,
facing a fire with a glass of wine,
an open book lying cover up against my knees,
the sun warms my face and I re-member...
Summer,
ripe as putrid oranges,
penicillin green,
sweet as honeysuckles swaying gently
bee-ing pollinated.
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A wind flows.
It hits the cottonwoods along the stream, breaking twigs and sweeping leaves that did not fall.
It spits them out and down.
They mark a spot to be...
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Loud the wind sounds on and with it rides the smell of moldy hay and the sweet alfalfa breath of heifers.
I steal a breath and run across the field,
despite my tired feet.
