Living the Dream

Montana is called “Big Sky” country
but it is also, big desert area,
where the spurred spirits whisper
and the wind snarls their plans
for another hole in the wall gathering
somewhere up in the rocky Mountains.
It isn’t the sky that is big.
It is the river valleys that sneak
and snake through chiseled beds
like a bow in arrow gullies,
hills, folding over the banks
like the canvas fly of a tipi leans.
Rivers, are woven like braids,
from the head of Old Chief
who lies on is back watching the stars
to count the winters that have stitched
themselves around the clumps of sage.
Lakes lie flat, like plates, like saucers,
like blue eyes staring up from Custer’s hill.
Big-nosed rises, and rounded displaced hills
hunker down for a season of sweat or snow
or sad stories to ooze out of cracks
in the old buffalo wallow beds.

Montana, a carcass of an old cowboy
with squished hat shadowing a dusted brow,
wrinkles from the daylong dry winds,
and too many things to squint your eyes at.
In places, the earth oozes red from the rusted metal
barrel of the guns buried, and the blood bled.
Leaning back on the saddle of hills,
to roll thin papers of memories, crooked,
against the lick of the tip of a tongue,
that could tell stories, if we listened
to the shuffling sand. If we read the cryptic
impressions that the tumble leaves
as it scrapes its history across the miles of flat
sandpaper land. The rivers would sing
you to sleep under the flicker of hope that the grass
will grow green and the buffalo will return
from that other Big Sky Country.

Tags: Poems //