Dirt Cowboy

Dirt Cowboy

Oh heart, oh heart,
I sit here writing your name
on pieces of paper, folded,
hidden, misplaced.

There is the element of saying
and there is the element of making:
one needn't choose.
I am singing the dream out from the ice,
asking it to carry me like a horse
or a river, down and away.

This day, here in paned-glass sun,
the young waitress shaking out her apron
and retying it flat across her stomach--
a bit of vanity, her hair
brushed from her neck,
crash of milk bottle, granite counter, cream,
and the roots of habit and longing
briefly siezed by the mind.
So noisy here! The sound echoes up
out of all years, brought
to this showing forth.
Unrehearsed! It seems we
wake and find ourselves
doing, embodying,
the ancient gestures
by which we recognize
ourselves completed.
Not one of us could be born
and invent
life--it must show through us--
the arm flung in the air,
the coffee poured,
and down the street
someone hurrying by
head down against wind.

And a man and a woman
come to an old grief
carved in them, carved
into them--
the old way of water wearing rock
by law, and the hatred
between them is equal to the hope
neither will release.

Each wants to be whole,
to be all of time, when nothing
in this world is whole, and
this is by law.

When my father said bitterly
to my mother: you have changed,
he meant, without meaning to say,
how she had changed him. A man
holds his head down against the wind.
Yet the wind fills him
with the dust of temples,
the breath of the dead.
The dream of the light
inside the branches--
a gleam of wet, glimmer
that is a bud, the leaf
within the bud.

The photographer comes inside
and closes the lens of his camera. Then he
is the lens. Then my eye
is the light. This
is the element of saying.
The young waitress flings a
paper cup behind her, into the trash can.
That is a saying. The cream swirled
into the coffee, the sugar
dissolved, disembodied,
and the body of the
manager disappears,
swallowed behind a door.

The element of making is slow,
uncertain as a temple,
a falling forward, stitching back,
like a stone wall,
like the panes in an
arched window, like a repetiton
chosen beyond necessity.

Yet somehow we have seen
all this before--
the girl in the fur hat
speaking syrup into a phone;
the falseness of her charm
is an ancient imposter, familiar and
therefore true.
A door is opened and falls
closed. Suddenly at every table
someone looks down and is reading--
books, newspapers, calendars,
reading tea leaves, reading bones.

A woman in a periwinkle jacket: I am reading
her shoulders as the day introspects.

In dream the passive construction
and the past perfect tense prevail:
she was being pushed on a swing.
The woman with many
television credits
gazes out the window,
forgetting herself,
heavy with age, forgetting
this, forgetting sorrow, the
false husband, the crippled child,
old plots forgetting,

and it is suddenly beautiful
as something read or dreamed, the young
waitress with sun on her
face, her unblemished face,
forgetting eternity.

When a face is beautiful
above all others--your name--
when a woman appears as a
bird of prey
and we turn away
hoping not to be recognized--
oh heart!--

when the light on the branches
flares in a window with no sky,
this is old story reading us, these are springs
from words laid down before
and ahead of us,
and in the moment we are
making an answer.