That sure as hell ain't a sunrise
The Murky Fringe: Good morning. What is it about words—written or spoken, I guess—that seems so perfectly conducive to conveying the experience of the cowboy?
Cowboy Poet: The size of a boot doesn’t matter so long as a bull knows who its mother is.
MF: Ahh, okay. But the words that you use, they’re so effective in describing the slow life of a man in motion, living in harmony with the land.
CP: Ain’t a handful of soil I’ve encountered yet which’n doesn’t want to be turned.
MF: Interesting. See, right there, the personification of a handful of soil, it’s just—
CP: Every sunset is seven shades of dust rolling through sky on its way to a new somewhere. Snap your fingers, son.
MF: It’s interesting you should bring up sunsets. The sunset is such a central figure in your poetry; it somewhat strangely serves as both the beginning and the end of all of your collections. What made you resist bookending your collections with imagery of sunsets and sunrises? Or what is it about the sunset that also feels to you to be reminiscent of a beginning? So often the sunset depicts only an ending.
CP: Round about Oklahoma headin east it seems to me a horse and a man cease being anything other than a windmill flying loose among the leaves of a sideways tree.
MF: What makes a man a cowboy?
CP: A boulder on a mountain isn’t nothing but a drop of rain looking for something to fall on.
MF: It’s interesting to experience your abstract poetry in person and in the form of riddle-answers to my interview questions.
CP: Ten steps beyond the last of the last hilltops is a horse you ain’t never going to ride but ain’t a person alive can resist tryin.
MF: You’re famously absent from the public eye. Do you plan to release another collection of poems before the decade is up?
CP: A man drops both his arms into the ice cold of a river at dawn that’ll tell him what loyalty is.
MF: Thanks so much for your time. It’s been fascinating.
CP: Dirt. Dirt and blood.
