VOICES AT DAWN
Rain revisits morning black
upon my metal roof, gentle to begin with
like Drum�s Borderlands poems.
Vast landscape at dawn
awaiting the sun to erase the stars,
to clear the mountains� silhouette
from under a blanket
in a young cowboy�s worn
reclining chair
when I could not sleep
on the bunkhouse porch
of the Gray Ranch � steady
rumble of combustible snores
on tour
stacked in beds
inside the door
as I wondered why I was there.
Why I had no horse to saddle, no
place to be beyond the dawnlight
but an Arizona airport - where I would leave
the keys to my pickup parked in Fresno
sixty miles from my canyon home.
�You let �em catch and brush
your hair the right way, snug
the latigo up and steal a ride
just to see what they know,�
Gary tells me the next day.
�But you can always
change your mind.�
There is a way the landscape chisels
characters, shapes word and thought
from the hands that echo succinctly
off the mountains
at the brandings
burnt in your brain.
More than once, my father
would credit old Tom Homer
with saying, �He looks �
but he jess don�t see.�
How the simple wordplay
tickled him,
time and again
and through their eyes the sun rises
and sets in our dreams as we listen
and wait for each day to unwind.
I continue to edit this poem online. It may sound as if I�m unduly promoting Drum Hadley�s poetry, the reading of which has triggered my trip to the Gray Ranch on a Nature Conservancy tour of the Malpai Borderlands Group several years ago. Since writing the first draft, I ran across Drum's poem "Swallows" [page 330] written from "the Gray Ranch Porch before Dawn." The sun rises slow and easy in New Mexico, unlike our side of the Sierra Nevada range with sudden, blinding light.