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Collected Poetry

    (rd king dot net)
poetry and digital art

In California

  Big Assed Cows and Barbed Wire Fences 


The mountains are a barrier, august and wide,
with snow-capped peaks and a velvety fur
that we see and recognize as the forest.
Clouds catch on the trees.  A sly, dense fog
buries the valley floor.  Gray houses, gray coats
and faces.  Leafless ash.  Leafless cottonwood.
The river reflects its red steel bridges.
The farmer looks over his farmhands in the green
rectangular fields.  Linear copse and slough.
Black Angus ranches roll into the foothills.
An old black Ford kicks up mud on the country road.
Blackbirds line the old barbed-wire fences.
Big-assed cows, fat-assed pigs, big-assed horses.
Blue-jeaned women straddle tall stools
in the little old-town bars where the neon winks
and the elk can't shake off the cobwebs.
The elk and the sheriff and the cowboy and the stools.
Both the moon and the cowboy are black and blue.




 
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