Sheila Black

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Western

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They arrived past midnight at the

edge of the meadow where the three horses

grazed each day. Sham the docile mare,

Judy the brindle chestnut, Granite

the one I loved best—the white ungelded

stallion. The coyotes—they appeared

to appear only as shadows, except for

their yowling, which made our dog, Cooper

scratch at the screen, whinging to join them,

though the story we were told was

they would slaughter any tame dog—

That spring I planted lodgepoles for

the local millionaires for minimum wage

until sappy sores formed in the centers

of my palms. In the bars at night

I joked I was “Jesus Girl” only to be told

by Ray, the resident drunk cowhand,

that being Jesus was nothing new. “We’re

all Jesus,” he said, raising his scraggly

arms over his shaggy head. The year

we left, Granite broke a leg after being

sold at auction, a stranger shot him

in the head. I wonder how many of

the palm-sized trees survived, if they

have grown taller than me or if the summer

fires razed them all—a flicker, a shimmer

and back to forest floor; yet the palpable

memory of their ghost-green, holding

fistfuls of young needles. That I named them

even then ghosts. Now, I sit behind,

a diamond-paned window in Texas—

Permian Basin where oceans once crossed,

shell spines packed in deep mud. Cooper

is ashes in a cardboard box in my second

kitchen drawer. We were to plant

the lodge poles to restore the forests,

but the scars across the mountainsides

kept growing. I can close my eyes and almost

feel that light—the tendriling of northern

summer. What aria nearer than the sounds

the coyotes made, the line of them, a

chorus, calling us. Cooper whines beside me

with moist eyes—and I knew, I thought I

knew, what it is to wrangle such longing.

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