04-27-2024, 03:17 AM
My father’s dream
was to escape the city
so he bought forty acres
of a broken up ranch,
got a small herd of cows
and a bull he named Charlie.
We hauled hay, sprayed them
in summer against the swarming flies,
and he never sold one for slaughter.
His “hired hand”
a ninety year old native of the county,
carefully collected
stray pieces of barbed wire
carefully bundling them up:
“Texas wouldn’t be nothing
if it wasn’t for barbed wire.”
Once, they found a cow
on its side, trying to birth a dead calf
had to pull the already rotting
corpse out by hand.
I was a reluctant cowboy
but grew to love the land.
My father lived his dream life for seven years
until a heart attack took him down.
The cows long gone,
the place went back to the cedar.
But at age 40, I returned
to that specific universe of my youth.
I tended it, cutting cedar,
keeping the well running
keeping the acres around the cabin
mown, replacing the outhouse
as though my father might return.
It’s going back to the cedar now:
too far to go added to an old man’s reluctance
to revisit those many worlds of his past.
was to escape the city
so he bought forty acres
of a broken up ranch,
got a small herd of cows
and a bull he named Charlie.
We hauled hay, sprayed them
in summer against the swarming flies,
and he never sold one for slaughter.
His “hired hand”
a ninety year old native of the county,
carefully collected
stray pieces of barbed wire
carefully bundling them up:
“Texas wouldn’t be nothing
if it wasn’t for barbed wire.”
Once, they found a cow
on its side, trying to birth a dead calf
had to pull the already rotting
corpse out by hand.
I was a reluctant cowboy
but grew to love the land.
My father lived his dream life for seven years
until a heart attack took him down.
The cows long gone,
the place went back to the cedar.
But at age 40, I returned
to that specific universe of my youth.
I tended it, cutting cedar,
keeping the well running
keeping the acres around the cabin
mown, replacing the outhouse
as though my father might return.
It’s going back to the cedar now:
too far to go added to an old man’s reluctance
to revisit those many worlds of his past.