Morning coffee at the Bear Paw Bakery
requires the mettle of a Montana driver
The car acts like a drunk on the dirt road
Sloppy as a warm chocolate bar
I relax the steering wheel the way I learned at 14
to let go and give in to invisible great forces
Press the accelerator in my vintage Lucchese boot
to ten m.p.h. with no braking
To keep from sliding into the roadside parade
of young pheasants behind their mother
Down the road a cottontail wasn’t so lucky
In polite farmer protocol its flattened body
has been moved to the far side of the road
A murder of crows waits on a power line
to clean up the evidence
Feathers gleaming like the coal
my father mined in the years crops failed
Back at the cabin the die-hard walker
in me eases into Wellingtons
Not what I’d ever wear into the town
of Tony Lamas, John Deeres and Durangos
Mud has mortared enough on the dirt road for footprints
My earmark on the same land that was branded
by parents and grandparents
The swarm of dragonflies sired by heavy rains
disperses to flit from yarrow
to wheat grass to wild geraniums
Sun lights them like day fireflies
and heats the still air with sweet grass
vanilla scent and anise of coneflowers
The whole prairie sings a green song
By the time I backtrack to the cabin
tires have erased any right of ownership
The land has claimed itself once again
Winner of the 2014 Professional Writers of Prescott Poetry Contest; First published in Casa de Cinco Hermanas
