His Long-Promised Reckoning

After a life spent repairing

his cowhide heart that has ruptured

as often as a field of oil rigs

in the Panhandle heat

of an Amarillo summer,

a gunslinger of some years,

weathered to the amber of

Old Overholt Rye,

emerges from the final gasp

of train steam.

With a low-slung belt

and spurs as rusted as him

that jangle past the platform

of twirling parasols

that from space must surely

look like daisies,

he makes his way

toward his long-promised reckoning—

the high-noon showdown

at La Misión de las Almas Perdidas—

stopping twice:

once to stroke a gentle horse,

and once to catch his breath.

And then he stands

in the middle of the tree-lined crossroads,

whose leaves, red as Malbec,

cling to their branches

like kinfolk in the Great Flood,

praying, like him,

to hold on one last time.

But youth will outdraw him,

and the wind

will take the leaves.

In the end,

everything returns to dust,

and the fragments left behind

are all that light their trail to glory:

A misspelled name

on a weather-cracked wooden cross,

leaves gathered in a burlap shroud

and burned to ash,

the echo of a chapel bell,

and one mourner,

quiet as an unwound pocket watch,

who turned and walked away.