I will ride with you Juan Jaramillo
across the Missouri in springtime,
beyond the rank odor of buffalo
drowned in the breakup of ice.
Back east my mother weeps under an elm
but I hear the wind in your bandana,
feel your rough stubble prickle
my skin as I turn on the horn of your saddle,
and I am ready. For the Plains,
battered by locusts and hail,
and Santa Fe turquoise bracelets.
For side streets of wood smoke
before we cross the Great Divide
and take up sheep tracks
on the Navajo plateau. For hot
Mojave winds near San Bernardino,
for Colorado, for your vaqueros
in the San Joaquin—I am ready.
I will ride with you, Juanito,
with you and on you
in cabins of fire and ash,
because motion is a kind of music,
like wind in a sagebrush ocean
or the echo of hooves in a canyon
and it is only here, in the heat and the cold,
the thirst and the flood,
where space has more value
than gold, where time is measured
by growth of the juniper berry
and only erosion is history,
that I can hear and feel it,
that I can move.
