Open Range

 

Open Range

You study me from the shotgun seat
making me squirm so I point to a cow
scratching her back against a telephone pole
with obvious bovine pleasure. Evening gives
Nevada a beauty it lacks when bright and hot.

We from the foggy redwood coast of California
might never fit here but love passing
where somehow life makes a different sense.

One longhorn blocks us, ripping grass
from cracks in pavement. I stop the bug.
The beast outweighs it. We step out.

You’re gazing at me, not the munching cow
or the oncoming night of white clouds,
charcoal sky in a silence made more so
by the chirping of a single cricket.

We’re driving back roads to Boston
for jobs we don’t want but ought to try
for career, for good sense in a stone cold city.

My bladder calls. Black-eyed Susans
line the road so I aim at rocks
as it would seem a crime to pee on flowers
especially with you watching as you are.

“I might be pregnant,” you say. Your face,
always lit, now by starlight brighter still.
No breeze and yet the telephone wires
are singing, ringing.

Across the sky comes an orange flare,
too fast for a jet. I have time to say “Look!”
Without a sound the meteor explodes,
red fragments dropping like stars toward earth.

“I sort of knew,” I say. The moon is rising
from behind a mountain silhouetting each pine.
The glow advances tree to tree along the ridge
like the hand of a clock. And now we don’t care
if that cow stays forever.

“Thank you, Lucy,” you whisper toward the beast
who in truth has no name but an ear tag.
Without a word we W-turn the jam-packed beetle
forward, back, forward, back on the narrow lane
and drive westward, drive home.

…..

First published in Williwaw Journal — thank you Rachel Barton, editor
Photo by Ellen26 on Pixabay