mountains steady
in the distanced blue
desert gold
with loden shrub
and snowdrift
filling out the sage
why is it heart
breaking to know
the places where
few humans go
are those
of little change
little rain
inured from wreck
or residence
by hosting only
what persists
despite everything
to grow, or go,
snowgeese, antelope,
the common vole,
spike pointed wild
chive furrowing
an acidic root
into sandstone
and the hook-
beaked crow,
but not the cow
trucked in from
a pastoral scene
to fatten
in feedlots, no,
not these, who turn
run lowing
from the approaching storm
so the cold stops them dead
in their tracks,
not these animals
whose fear rolls
and pitches so any
human who approaches
sends their heavy bodies
staggering back
not these massive bulls
whose balls
the cowboy ties
together and together
full of fright
and flight
they ride.
THE COWBOY GETS RELIGION
The cowboy wrote me,
The west is vanishing,
and I am, too. He wrote,
the sea was born of earth
from the Great Salt Lake.
He wrote, come and find me
under the sow-soft sky
where the sweet scented corn
ferments in the bellies
of cattle. You see them
plodding after dark,
black cows asleep
on asphalt big enough
to stop a dooly truck.
The cowboy tried sailing.
Tried exploration, war,
tried and tried.
Each one slipped
he said over the edge
of evening and was lost.
Except this doomed existence,
he wrote, filling orders
for American appetites.
Whitened figure
on the sun-warm crust.
The gods and men
would love it here,
the cowboy wrote me.
Men awake
in the midnight squall,
men eating fried lotus
in the clicking heat,
men running headlong
into the funnel’s swirling heart,
he told me, to see the gods
at war. They take their dogs
with them everywhere they go,
so when you see one chained
outside a shop, you know
this, too, is a house of worship.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
