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Cowboy Poetry and Western Verse
The Barns on Western Prairie Roads
Tom Sheehan
West land has its own monuments,
most left by a mighty Higher Hand;
now and then, in a longer view
from a prairie road’s twist at a turn,
rides up, saddling the land, a barn
set out on grass by one man’s will.
From over a slight hill of grain,
over the roll of a wide prairie
still laying claim on the land,
these indomitable barns appear,
icons, markers, grayed leftovers
from the rumbled roar of cows,
horses in the herded thunders,
and rare cowboys mad-dashing
toward the lead of a mighty bull.
I am far eastward of this stabling
yet their stories hand me dreams,
weathered images of histories
of barns not meant to last this long,
but dot this road like chess pieces,
marking solitary plays in the game.
I hear the yells from in and out,
from barnyard and finished peak,
from the first ax bite to a peg’s
last place in hammering, saying
how they came, these old barns,
to be what they are, rare despots
of a harsh land and all its time;
all its adventures and romances;
its lift to starred stirrups, lifting me.
No longer straight, soft ridgepoles,
bent with years of Gulf-fed storm
or insidious crawl of wood-eaters,
send them back to bare beginnings
where I spy this old one coming up,
off there to the left, crowned up
like a chief rides the torrid battle,
bearing openly a brandished lance,
bow and arrow centering, six-guns
at length finding sway in arguments.
Buried in a wash of vine and leaf,
dyed of mahogany and dead maize
left too long to the weathering,
rebuked it must seem of sunlight
itself, ripening under dark edges,
one such barn, two centuries old,
hardly promises the next century.
Two hundred years of sweat stain
darkened hardness of its guts, its
boned and inner silhouetting; mock
residues only now becoming too soft
for its own well-being, the stretch
of one creature across centuries,
too fallible for the given chance.
I have hidden eighty years of my life
dreaming these odd posts and beams,
wandering in headless and heedless
of rare summer’s endings, the fall’s
short bit of sunlight in eaves full,
oh so full, of August madness, sieves
of my bare devilment at dreaming
and soft crumbling. Hard wood takes
into itself drafty alternate combustion
of tree, leaf and solitary seed wind-
swept and flying high and so deserted
one might think it’s all planned,
the documents scribed two hundred
years on pale parchments of time.
Probably darker than they ought,
barns so stretched out in centuries,
they wear years deep into each grain
gone brown, kneeling down and servile,
where they suffered for cow and horse
and miraculous mule strung in straps
yet hanging on walls like markers,
old leather goods we can smell as if
they’ve left a bit of bite as airy sign,
the scent of labor twice as old as time.
I struggle to catch these overviews
of western barns, stories attached,
the rhythms heard from landmarks
they leave me, staffed by caretakers
and the creatures they’ve housed.
Here hides ink’s odd stains on walls,
salt bares its hoary frost-like etch,
and authority, by long estimation
the awful and momentous authority
of shod hooves, carves out erosion
on thick planking, perhaps but once
planned for a healthy bit of forever
by one man, his grave long settled
near one corner with all his leavings,
hears a nail home, a new calf bawl,
and favored horse answer his last call.
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