7.

After days on the road half-sick on exhaust in the back
of a Greyhound we disembarked into a dreamland, my Oz,

standing disoriented on a tile mosaic of the head of a Hereford bull
in the lobby of the Stockmen's Hotel in Elko

The Wild West was somewhere between Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan,
and everywhere just around the bend were grizzlies and rattlers

renegades wearing warbonnets riding bareback
and a plain pine box displaying a dead man leaning against a barber      pole

It was out there just over the rise with real cowboys like John Wayne
cowboys in cowboy boots and cowboy hats

with silver buckles pinching hardrock bellies
and tanned leather faces with watering eyes squinting

through Camel smoke as they set cherries and lemons
to spinning against all odds, whooping and hollering

as alarms sounded and slot machines disgorged a sluice
of silver dollars, their hands black from dirty money

My mother took a job as a motel maid and at the El Rancho
met the man behind the curtain who would raise me

and after a short stay in central Utah amid Mormon relatives
so avid in their genealogy you saw them as

badgers digging into the roots of your family tree,
we soon found ourselves in the total immersion

of an Old Testament story of isolation and self-reliance
on the Hawthorne cattle ranch

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