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Dave Bonta
modern cowboy’s lament
You’re too florid, too weepy
for this sleepy street—
even the fireplug looks away.
The sidewalk should tip you off:
this ain’t no lone prairie.
Tumbleweeds never make it across I-35
so how the hell did you?
We’re proud of our values here—
especially our property values.
Only broke people walk
& to loiter is to litter.
We may wear big hats
as if at some point expecting
exposure to the elements
but for God’s sake, son,
bare winter prairie &
a little smoke rises
from an empty field
I am mature, a man child, in America, in the West, in the
great valley of the Mississippi. My head arises above
the cornfields. I stand up among the new corn.
I am a child, a confused child in a confused world. There
are no clothes made that fit me. The minds of men
cannot clothe me. Great projects arise within me. I
have a brain and it is cunning and shrewd.
I want leisure to become beautiful, but there is no leisure.
Men should bathe me with prayers and with weeping,
but there are no men.
Now — from now — from to-day I shall do deeds of fiery
meaning. Songs shall arise in my throat and hurt me.
I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies.
The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how
they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their
hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a
great pageant of dusk,
Those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
And the buffaloes are gone.
This handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter
mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the
sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender.
Prairie roses, two of them, climb down the sides of
a road ditch. In the clear pool they find their
faces along stiff knives of grass, and cat-tails
who speak and keep thoughts in beaver brown.
These gardens empty; these fields only flower ghosts;
these yards with faces gone; leaves speaking as
feet and skirts in slow dances to slow winds; I
turn my head and say good-by to no one who
hears; I pronounce a useless good-by.
Boy heart of Johnny Jones — aching to-day?
Aching, and Buffalo Bill in town?
Buffalo Bill and ponies, cowboys, Indians?
Some of us know
All about it, Johnny Jones.
Buffalo Bill is a slanting look of the eyes,
A slanting look under a hat on a horse.
He sits on a horse and a passing look is fixed
On Johnny Jones, you and me, barelegged,
A slanting, passing, careless look under a hat on a horse.
Go clickety-clack, O pony hoofs along the street.
Come on and slant your eyes again, O Buffalo Bill.
Give us again the ache of our boy hearts.
Fill us again with the red love of prairies, dark nights, lonely wagons, and the crack-crack of rifles sputtering flashes into an ambush.
Jimmy Wimbledon listened a first week in June.
Ditches along prairie roads of Northern Illinois
Filled the arch of night with young bullfrog songs.
Infinite mathematical metronomic croaks rose and spoke.
Rose and sang, rose in a choir of puzzles.
They made his head ache with riddles of music.
They rested his head with beaten cadence.
Jimmy Wimbledon listened.
Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car.
Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour.
Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new
hay crops, swaths of new hay laid in the sun.
A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front
of the post-office never blink an eye.
A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on
a black wall map, never blink an eye.
A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City,
keeps his place at a window with the serenity of a
bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass
whispering.
Your western heads here cast on money,
You are the two that fade away together,
Partners in the mist.
Lunging buffalo shoulder.
Lean Indian face,
We who come after where you are gone
Salute your forms on the new nickel.
You are
To us:
The past.
Runners
On the prairie:
Good-by.
I AM riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
answers : " Omaha."
Among the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and
red crag and was amazed;
On the beach where the long push under the endless tide
maneuvers, I stood silent;
Under the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant
over the horizon's grass, I was full of thoughts.
Great men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers,
mothers lifting their children — these all I
touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them.
And then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions
of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than
crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the
darkness of night — and all broken, humble ruins of
nations.
Letters from Home, you said.
Unopened they lay on the shack-sill
As you stared with me at the prairie
And the foothills bathed with light.
Letters from Home, you whispered,
And the homeland casements shone
Through the homeland dusk again,
And the sound of the birds came back,
And the soft green sorrowing hills,
And the sigh of remembered names,
The wine of remembered youth,--
Oh, these came back,
Back with those idle words
Of "Letters from Home"!
Over such desolate leagues,
Over such sundering seas,