To Wyatt Earp
You were the reason I started to draw.
Sitting in the backseat of a bright pink rental car,
My grandparents in the front seats, bickering
About whether grandmother would make a good
Park ranger, I sketched your profile from a book.
I was obsessed with you, could tell anyone anything
They’d like, or wouldn’t like, to know about you,
And I wondered how my pencil scribbles became you:
Calligraphic mustache, bushy eyebrows, cavernous eyes,
And skin like desert sand. You were nothing, uncreated,
Then a thought transformed to shape, a stirring image:
Head to hand to page. And there you were. My lap.
On that vacation, in Arizona, riding along flat highways,
My grandparents taking turns at the wheel, I created you
Because you created me: I on my pilgrimage, our car
Come covered wagon. My bright white shoes tall boots;
My never-before-shaved face mustached;
My hide rough and russet as a bison’s backside.
Tombstone, Tucson, the Painted Desert and Grand Canyon:
They became memory, but not you, not the man I made;
Not the lead lines on the white and wrinkling paper,
The lewd likeness of the man I pretended to know.
Silent, demonstrative: you, your gun, my flair,
And now a paling portrait in some dark desk drawer.
|
