A Buckaroos’s Lament

If I don’t know where I was, how can I get back there?

     Overheard in a bar in Elko awhile back

I see the dip and rise of sage-covered hills

a willow bank, chokecherry, wild rose,

and aspen shaking in the morning breeze.

Could have been a lot of places, I suppose,

and I know what you’ll say--

we don’t learn who we are in a day.

And yet it is a day and place that stays,

when I knew I could hold the herd in an easy way.

When I consider how I’ve strayed and why

I’d give anything to go back and see

a younger me riding tall, riding free.