Cutting Loose in the Springtime
I.
Billy Brown, being an old Texas cowboy,
Was a hard and fast tie man.
That means he tied his rope solid,
Or fast, to the saddle horn, as against dallying.
Dallying means to take turns of the rope around the saddle horn,
To hold an animal you've got roped,
So if something happens and you start to get into a wreck,
You can let your rope slide around the saddle horn,
Or take those dallies off the horn.
Billy only dallied roping little calves in a corral,
'Cause, he said, you had to learn it when you were young,
Or you couldn't do it well enough to keep from losing
A finger, or a hand, or a thumb.
Billy carried a knife strapped to his chaps right above his thigh bone,
So if he had a cow brute, or some critter roped,
And he was tied hard and fast,
And was maybe riding a spinning, pitching colt,
With the coils of that rope winding around him,
He could pull his knife free, and start cutting loose.
II.
Sometimes, Spring comes whirling up these desert canyons
From the South so strong, I'd cut loose and go a-prancing. . .
With one of these light seeds that flies up towards the canyon rim.
Sometimes, those sweet scents of the Sprintime
Come whirling up these draws from Mexico so strong,
When the blood-weed starts greening up,
And the mourning doves start calling long,
Long into the beginning of the morning.
III.
When the Spring winds come blowing down the ridge lines,
And you feel them blowing along the creased lines of your skin,
Who would tell Springtime to be still,
Or to go away from the rims of these dry canyons and hills,
Till all the honey and all the humming bees,
And those light blue eyes are gone?
Who would tell the Springtime to be still?
___________________________
Drummond Hadley
Voice of the Borderlands
Rio Nuevo 2005
_______________________________________
I had a phone call once from Drummond Hadley.
Nice surprise! Drum was calling me in the very
early days of the cell phone, those big submarine sandwich
size things. Drum said he wanted to tell me how much
he liked my book of poems Where Rivers Meet, and
he said he had driven his pickup truck to the
highest section of his vast ranch in
Arizona (Drum was a real cowboy)
so he could tell me. With guys like
Drum, it's important that you know
that he means to get across.
Voice of the Borderlands
is a masterpiece at stories
and true characters getting across
in elegiac and narrative poems,
side-glances and the great unknown.
Go there. Get lost. Be found.
[ BA ]
