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 the sistine chapel of a setting sun over the mesa,
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 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 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.
