The Sagebrush Kid

Grew up healthy and rarely sick
running sagebrush hills outside of Kennewick.

Wasn't football big, but I was quick
played flag football growing up in Kennewick.

Now as I am looking back
I can see that I had a knack
for dodging balls thrown at me,
for climbing monkey bars and trees,
for running hills and shooting bows,
for dirt clog fights and fishing poles,
for adventures in the ditch of death
that ran outside the town of Kennewick.


Up ahead my collie was on the run
as I ran the sagebrush hills of eastern Washington.

Overhead the August sun burned down,
turning my shirtless hide a shade  of  hunter brown. 

I learned my early hunter ways
turning over boards the scorpion was found,
jackrabbits ran a full circle round
arrows shot up came back down
gophers lived in holes in the ground
and the sun burned  skin until it turned brown
and the snake and lizard were hard to hunt
in the Horseheaven Hills of my eastern Washington.

Now as I am look to my past and  back
I see I walked on both sides of the track

Hiking to train bridges and then to dikes
that held the mighty Colombia back

I see my hunting ways as metaphor
preparation for a future Asian war
my boyhood encounters with green racer snakes
all the tracking that true hunting takes
prepared me for my twisted fate
as some out there in sagebrush hills can relate.



                                          TWO


Now everything seems symbolic, some way, some how.
I use to have whopping cough, but I ain't got it now.

Had a cap gun way back when I was ten.
Didn't need no reason to do much way back then.

Now everything seems symbolic.

That drunk swinging on the bus depot door
saying that he is God and he wanders.

And me standing up in that empty cathedral
asking, "who are we to ever doubt?"


A snake once crawled out of the jungle.
Looked up and down a road
on which I was standing in the shadow of tree.

The snake then crawled through that shadow
and came between my legs.
Resting itself on my boot, the snake looked
up and down that road again
knowing it had to be careful
because that was the highway of men.

Now that snake seems symbolic
as I remember back.

Standing still there in nature
in the coolness of God's shadow
I was at peace
without fear of that creature.
There in the jungle with that snake
I was at home and
the war was no more.

Now everything seems symbolic:
the snake and the alcoholic,
the memories where my mind likes to frolic,
and I have become comfortably numb.




                                      Three

The frost  was on the Hill where where Joe jumped off
The meadow lark had no trill and was developing a cough.

The sage all held a Christmas frost and looked like neon wood.
The hunters tried the Indian walk but it did no good.

All the game had left long before each frozen step
As the owl looked down from its frozen mound.