Bedtime Story

This story is colored blue.
For two days we watch them come through.
Now and again, palominos and sorrels and bays
in every brown hue of shining summer-hide sell,
but mostly we see blue, blue, blue.

Of all the quarterhorses in the world,
George says, only one percent are roan,
and of all the roans in the world
only ten percent are blue.

This story is a dream I replay before sleep-
the dryland corn north of the city of North Platte
already disked under in this year of drought,
the South Platte a sick woman in a wide bed
of sand. Behind the barn all the boys' talk is
a scarcity of grass. No one offers a toke,
not even as a joke. No laughing matter.

We've come from half the states
and provinces of North America,
a conference of snoose-eaters
beneath a circus bigtop-
snapping canvas and taut guylines,
sideshow vendors of silver-mounted bits
and gal-leg spurs sporting three-inch rowels,
rawhide bosals and plaited horsehair,
bright buttersoft chaps and chinks,
everything a working cowboy
collector could conceivably want.

But it's blue theater, too,
the hands outfitted in court colors,
the patron of these ninety sections,
these scattered thousands of cattle
and these gathered hundreds of horses
speaks in soliloquy of pedigree,
introduces his family,
his voice breaking at his father,
wheelchair-bound, broken past
where any dude
would put a horse down.

Do we wonder then in Act Two
when this ambitious prince
speaks in an aside to his ringman?
That though we cannot hear the words,
we see that man with such gentle hand
among the colts steel his eye,
set his jaw and blanch?

*

What's behind it all?
Stud horse and mare heat,
cold jaws and knotheads,
pigeyes and yellow teeth,
trail dust and long horn,
bean belly, summer heat
and lightning strike, frostbit ears,
steels shoes and smashed toes,
the lightning kick to the belly,
the shiver beneath the shimmering hide,
the shudder of one going down,
wire-cut horseflesh crawling
with maggots awash in pus,
that floating arc from saddle seeming
eternal before the sudden solid earth.

*
How deep into the cave of dreams dare we crawl?
The long, sick crossing of the Western Sea?
Some Bedouin war, or the Asian steppes?
The full circle of half-horses picking
their way across a bridge of ice?
Turn back to the light
where la riata becomes lariat,
where vaquero births buckaroo,
where caballero evolves to cowboy,
to the busted-up, bent-bone Wyoming waddy

leafing through his scrapbook
to Nebraska in the '40s.
Studying the hammerheads he says,
Horses sure have come a long ways.

Out past the museum display of family buggies,
out here among the back corrals
where George checks on some minor studs,
to this '77 F-Series flatbed
trailering an open blue Texas fifth-wheel
and this border heeler,
his coat and eyes so identically blue
I can't at first see if he's awake
or sleeping amidst the junk under the hitch,
and this young cowboy under his blue feed cap,
the hem of his blue jeans worn to batting
and hooked over his half-inch rowels.

He allows he'd started a couple
for the outfit, but he wasn't no regular hand,
you understand, and yeah, there was some crosses
some while back that wouldn't so much buck
as run away with the cowboys.

George volunteers that these folks
sure seem to be nice people.

The boy looks away
and shifts from hoof to hoof
like an honest colt caught
by the sloppy reinsman's sneeze,
tongues his butterscotch
candy like a bit,
looks the other way,
opens his mouth to speak,
speaks, and says nothing at all.