Beautiful Wrangler
Originally appeared in Lost and Found Times, Columbus, OH
Beautiful wrangler of midnight crops,
Porch phantom, thunder cleric, woodlot doll,
Come needling the gingered grain of this room where
New hinterlands spring between the covers,
Bushes shaking with crayons and trances of shops;
Stir waves of ink through your stormy grove rife with bitters,
Lapping tea and tonic to old-fashioned vats secretly feeding
One marshy canal whose tide is mine,
Pumping the wellspring of my shiprock fancy;
Come swooning to a needlework of velvetine noises
Prancing my bookends, stovepipes, my cartographic showers,
To discover your green-eyed diagram
The loving transposition
Of your life.
David Thomas Roberts, (July 8, 1991)
