Butte, MT 1927
The sky’s traffic is cumulus, but not too.
Our elk’s an arch across Main. Eighty feet high
and just as wide. Beneath its copper-gilded withers
pass boys with tubas, teen twirlers, wreathed
ponies, and the miners’ widows—in turn
and on time. Elk of extended thanks.
Darkness adorns those antlers long before
it decks us. Raucous was the way up the Great
Divide; raucous the way down, past the ore-carts,
past the blind mules dozing on their feet.
Dear elk, mayn’t we dote awhile longer?
We do it so well from below. March we tall
toward the short story’s end. We were all
you withstood. So toots the piccolo.
