In the Dance Hall of the Silver Dead

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.

Colorado Romance:

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, rivers run rocks, some run red,

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.