Dan Crawford
Christine Salvatore
Poetry Workshop
2/16/2018
After losing your rider at Blazer’s Mill
you are lost in a land
where the script has already
been written and
all things are coarse
and bare, yielded to an end
omnipresent, to cracked earth and bleached stone.
You wander riderless
past a desperate copse of chaparral.
You step over sand piper, sand dragon,
etch prints into crust
that are dismissed
with the next ragged gust.
Coal-fire Mountains teethe
a vacuous, hollow sky.
You walk amidst the dying.
You pad to a bedrock headstone
among the bleak grey bones of time.
You brush past saguaro that grinds
your unheard snorts, whimpers and whines.
You loll in a furnace wind unrefined
of the breezy musk of dampened corral grass,
the tanned rider’s whispered word and leathered lash.
It will come like sand brushed on crystal glass.
You will stop at last and make your peace
With an end born from memory of a ridered past.