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| Summer in the San Juan Mountains - Colorado |
"Colorado Romance"
was first published in
The Chariton Review
at Truman State University
in the Spring 2002 issue.
Down on Our Luck in Leadville,
Shooting Stars Over Silverton
James Hart
for Ethan
In the West, they still honor a
man’s anonymity
if you’re just another tourist
looking for a past,
tracking gamblers with their fists
full of gold.
Remember how we tried to find Doc
Holliday’s
grave on the cliff top over
Glenwood Springs,
a steep climb for midwestern men
from plains
where cemeteries make green rolling meadows
full of gray stone sheep grazing
over bluegrass.
Like a relic hunter beaten to your
dig, you found
he lay in a nameless grave, a
granite monument
carved with cards and smokeless
guns of stone,
an epitaph perhaps to Lady Luck: He Died in Bed.
We almost found him in Leadville, a
good name
for the mines, or hell, or for a
gunman’s bullet
in the back, when a woman told you
a man down
the street collected his legend’s
artifacts: kings,
queens, jacks around a table, aces
in the sky,
painted ladies of the night, Tabor
Opera House
memorabilia, Matchless Mine where
Baby Doe
sleeps alone in her dance hall of
the silver dead.
He owned things belonging to the
elusive Doc,
but he too turned out to be out of
town that day.
Somewhere down the road we saw a
ragged flock
of magpies spread like a hand of
cards in black
and white resting mutely in a hangman’s
tree,
or maybe that’s just my joker’s
vivid memory
at play since I know your mood
turned to lead,
you so close to legend to be shot
down that way.
And I recall when we began the long
drive home,
climbing east from four flat
corners of endless
emptiness, I was daydreaming as I
drove us past
the Anasazi winds we heard through
Mesa Verde’s
canyon ruins, how their lost words
and wisdom
rolled mysteriously by, stone men
throwing bones,
how you named the horses we rode
west of Vail.
Now, I can’t remember the name of
the little place
we stopped for gas and a pause to
stretch our legs
somewhere south in the Sangre de
Cristo range,
something unknown about the place
inviting us
where morning air was humming
through pines
as dozens of ruby-throat
hummingbirds hovered
sucking sugar-water from hanging
glass globes.
Here in Colorado
and vision blurs to luxurious
emerald whirring
where waters and wings stir back
hidden years
and we see lost evanescence of the
West exists
in stone, and time is slower than
gamblers’ hands
if it doesn’t stop altogether as it
did in Silverton’s
Teller House. There rooms hadn’t changed faces
in over 50 years, as if waiting for
Edward Hopper
to step off a silver train’s
shooting star and paint
a woman naked, a harlot ghost where
we slept,
while in the street below,
leather-clad cowboys
throttled Harleys in the night, sat
fat in saddles
like knights errant slapping down
empty grails
of beer, crumpled cards folded in
the alley dust,
revving nameless wind, thunder
under Avalon.
