Boxcar living in a barren field, border
of the copse. Sweet mother was a desert,
black father was a friar, an Eisenhower
freeway.
               Custer was a motherfucker.

Blackened catfish, rainbow trout, milk
bottles cooled in the running stream.
Not too cold here, never gets too cold
here to live out of doors. Wool blankets,

Pendleton mounds she’s buried under.
Solar shower, star warmth. Broken treaty,
Quaker oats.
                    Testimonies of simplicity,
waning years of my convincement.

This is all, was all a note from my under-
ground, a verse in the gunfighter ballad,
the trail song of my self-mythology.

The rivers, the rivers and the graves,

the ghost and the bedroll:
                                        brought forth,
letter by letter, bound in string and glue,
they are said to dispel vanity and sorrow,

cleverness and envy.

Beatified by silences and greenery
like the black angus, I’ve got style.
Like the Mexican juniper, like fibers
braided to twine,
                          and twine braided to rope.

Balanced above it, you’ve got style like
the surroyal antlers of a magnificent rack,
like a cluster of blackberries.
Like an Indian Chief.

All is style, and style is all the elegant
pursuit of dementia, of occupation
in these endless hours.
                                   How, if we are
falling, you curl into a tuck and I go slack,

but anything in-between is unbecoming.
And our rafters would sooner be exposed.
More or less less as a matter of taste.

This is style: black tie, dear, all soaped up

and shining;
smoke curling away from a burning tree,
flambeau of tired nations;
ninety fig tree angels, full and chaste.

Our sacred characters may now request
extreme unction.