American Mythic
He endures:
Cowboy effinwestian.
He sent a picture of his trailer.
I knew what he wanted;
I sent him a picture of my Ford F-150.
He added /writer to his occupation.
I added barrel racing to my hobbies.
He changed his font to the same one I use.
I set a shortcut to his ad on my desktop.
He said the earth beneath his ranch hummed
in B flat and that his wind chimes taught themselves
to harmonize;
said his horses cantered in heroic hexameter,
and the wolves in his valley howled blank verse.
I told him wolves lie,
and his horses were anarchist spies,
but I caught a B flat in Jackson Hole once
and rode it up the ecliptic into a sky
almost as wide as my longing.
I told him I fell outta that big sky
into the divide between men’s minds and spirits,
and that if he were so inclined,
I could use a hand getting out.
I felt him peer at me
over the edge of that divide.
I did my best to blend into the scenery
and waited.
Campfire
Within this aeolian landscape where
cowboys and underdogs collect, sorted,
sieve-like by the weight of their thoughts,
landing hard enough to knock loose
some tears, salt the plain, the air currents lighter,
prancing ahead with other deliveries,
he conjures his subjective self from the
caramelized grit in his cast iron pan.
The burden of ego expertly carved
into edible slices, gracefully
arranged on a battered tin plate extended
in her direction, evoking
a strained benevolence, a déjà vu,
foreign but familiar, that puts a tang
of melancholy into every bite.
And their sighs fly together with profound
pleasure to savor what was thought extinct,
fueling a most primal connection:
the holy hush of vulnerability;
like blood type O, the unassailable
donor, delivering life just in time.
Regardless of what you might think about cigarettes and the icons associated with them, The Marlboro Man was this woman’s first crush. From there she quickly moved on to any man who was friendly with an apron and cooked in cast iron.