To some, she was just an old woman,
others had an everlasting love for her,
whose spirit was both stern and compassionate,
to those that she guarded and delivered.
Her yard was always swept,
with borders of blooms,
and at her porch's edge,
grew her masterpiece,
where the rainwaters dripped.
Her labors of love,
over quilts and patched jeans,
a trade she fulfilled,
while sitting in her porch rocker,
with her incantations of job.
To some, she was just an old woman,
others had an everlasting name love for her
they knew that the name she carried,
was but an earthly passing...
I read this a number of years back in Elko, at one of my first readings, much like the late Montana poet, who met me outside Colorado Springs where I read, commented me on the piece that I read there...Skinny Rowland...Skinny had a saying that he wrote to forget, not to remember. ..I liked this honestly of the late Montanan Cowboy...And to honored by such a great American meant much to me...I write not to remember but to get that "stuff' out of my head...Again, the year that I read this piece, after I had left the room at the Elko Convention center, there stood the great-sober...-the old horse doctor himself...baster black... He commented on this verse, and to have received such an acknowledgement was if Faulkner, Hemingway, or other greats had posed their positive thoughts......One nite at the upper room above the Stockmans Cansino before he got hitched up behind the plow again...baster was leaning up against the wall with his chair, there in the corner, fearful that if he moved his recliner would collapse...I would dare not to call him intoxicated, but I felt that he was securing that wall whereas it would not fall upon us...Reclined with such balance...Ian would might say that the cowboys gets drunk and the muse places his lyrics in balance....
