Return to Montana

My split-rail fence holds air
and totters like el senior Quixote.
Exeunt the Cowboy Chorus
their riatas, their graceful hoolihans.

Seven years now in recovery,
Jose goes below.  "Big rocks're
gone," his pry-bar rings and bends,
Jose pries the maw, "the old days rocks

they were rocks,"  but I deny
my role in the touristing of the West,
viz., the number fourteen camas buffalo,
and query this Jose, How about over there?

"Oh humps and tongues," laments Jose.
Out here in the dust we're seeing a  return
to glassy stones-sapphire, jade,
some two- and three quart Carmelite.

"Don't think so," frowns Jose, gazing
arm's length on a skull of beryl cauliflower,
a.k.a. 'bean poke', its creamy matrix
sweating drips and rivulets of gold.

"See?" exhorts our expert, my heart
aflutter: "Looks real, but she Taiwanese."
Ah, and how many times have I
picked up and discarded real gold

assuming Taiwanese?  In sobriety
Jose's regained his dentist's eye, 
but now,  now the cobbled afterthought.
His coffee breath exhumes belief -- not French 

roast; the canned stuff Thursdays -
and draws me in.  I would endure
the bitterness of Ruth for one taste
of the real thing.  "Look at here," 

his gray, goose-egg cobble in its atmosphere.
Clouds part - a tiny acreage, a hillside
blanketed in snow, and seven ponderosa
leaning to the sky, their actual shadows this

afternoon all aiming north.  "This one,"
says Jose, "she wants listening to," and probes
the botany with an otoscope.  "Turn him up,
Omar!" bellows our Jose, and from the maw

below the fence a strangled voice: "This better?"
Ergo wind.  A vowel of forgotten sage,
of lavender pinon smoke and blown

snow arguing up the hill then
sitting down again,  of silence.  Goats
now, their ancient bells.

Murray Moulding




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