A VAQUERO KILLS COYOTE ON FRAGOSO RIDGE

I don't know where you dragged
your broken body after the shot that startled
my walk. But here I am the next day, eyes
to the ground, crisscrossing Trujillo's pasture.

I wonder which one of the buckskin humps
scattered across the vega is you, and which
a chunk of Dakota sandstone heaved up
from the needle grass and black grama sod.

Did the bullet's impact slam into you hard
and roll you down the hill? Or did you make it across
the arroyo before the cross hairs caught
your stride and the cowboy's finger twitched?

I wander the field rock to rock,
like a woman after a battle, looking for a loved one,
wishing you not the agony of wounds,
afraid to find you alive or dead.

I promise you this. Where you fell I will turn
your face once more to the sun and sing
a prayer, sprinkle you with sage and let
my blade sanctify your life in its absence.

I'll scrape your skin clean, soak it
with brain fat and cedar smoke, wear you
on the full moon nights when they think a man
mad who howls at the calcium light.

I'll be there in the thump and gurgle of the dream
that wakes the vaquero sweated to his sheets,
the dream that will tremble his hands and falter
his eye the next time his gun rises

and then falls in the quaking quiet that drones
his ears, the moment before the ridges
all around us erupt in wild and joyous
laughter.


© 2001 by Richard Todd

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