ELKO 2012

Brought home a little cold
lingering in fits of coughing, remembering
the moment pneumonia set in
outside the Star 2009, inhaling
a cigarette and twenty below,
or smoking in the alley between
the Stray Dog and the Pioneer bar:
Mike Beck & the Bohemian Saints
pounding sound, like hammer to anvil—
old kids removed from the flagellating
and flailing crowd, flesh pressed
to howling, rocking blocks around.

Who’s hand, who’s hug, who’s heart
allowed the germ to spring like grass
thick after a warm rain? All the kind souls
come for comforting. All the lost ghosts
of the missing that haunt the Stockman’s,
its timbers now begging for another fire.

Unless you are a young poet,
one doesn’t go to Elko in January
on a whim—the cold middle-of-nowhere
makes its sort of the weak-hearted,
of the cowboy dilettantes and devos,
because everyone leaves
with a little something,
like it or not.