The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

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