FreezeRay:  Poetry With A Pop
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GREGORY CROSBY

Prescott, Arizona


At once the quick & the dead

& the gun-hand aches, bullet-grazed, scar sapphire

near the hollow that holds the pen

& the eye outdrawn,

long recessional riding out of town into faultless sky

toward something inside, riding hard, moving

(a runaway stage)

& see the first face the mustache

& melodrama soundlessly turn to

the camera

& pull the trigger

& see

Marlene Dietrich wiping the red stain from her own lips before dying
into a kiss

& Gary Cooper stinking of fear as he searches every eye for the staving off
of fate

& Jimmy Stewart wild-eyed enraged pulling his dread bountiful corpse to his
grieving chest

& John Wayne holding his arm wounded beyond speech in the coffin of
open daylight

& Dean Martin trembling in invulnerable vulnerability, a drunk playing a drunk
playing drunk

& Clint Eastwood painting the town red as surgery, steely eyed as a surgeon
silent as death

& Tom McLaughlin with his black hat & half-breed defiance, rifle balanced upon
one hip

& Val Kilmer whispering “I’ll be your huckleberry,” a death rattle escaping his
blue lips

& it’s drinks all around,

after hours, the frontier

grand opening, going out of business

& teary cowboys brand the sacred cows

lowing on the subdivided plains

& video poker is allowed to practice

its ancient way of life out on the Rez

& nostalgia for the never was, the

never would droops like a sunset

ridden into, written off:

the Old West in aspic

& standing up, weary, from the table

where aces of a sort were once cradled in sleeves,

where once love letters poured, a fat vein

of silver for gilded lilies

& striding out from under pressed tin

heavens, the moon-faced popeyed gargoyles

of the Hotel St. Michael, staring,

& into summer light across the courthouse square

alone between bandstand & brash, brass,

bronze Bucky O’Neill (shot through

his big mouth at San Juan Hill),

walking in the steps of Billy Jack,

tinder-footed & green-horned,

& like him planting one sole,

firmly in the memory,

& wheeling the other, a hawk

(callused, earthbound)

on the arc of myth, mischance,

right into the face of the

implacable enemy--

dueling with

sundown,

heart hid

behind a

star,

face

turned

west

Gregory Crosby's work has appeared in Court Green, Copper Nickel, Epiphany, Rattle and Leveler, among others. He used to be an art critic, but then thought better of it. 


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