From garden-beds I tend, it is not far <br />To those great ranges where he used to ride; <br />Time’s shadowy Door still stands a rift ajar, <br />And Fancy, glancing backward and aside, <br />May glimpse him whirling in a storm, of dust, <br />A flashing bronze against a burning sky, <br />Before a sea of tossing horns up-thrust, <br />A peril thousand-pronged, to breast or die; <br />Or lying with locked hands beneath his head, <br />Watching the stars beside a lonely fire, <br />About him dim immensity outspread <br />Within, dim gulfs of question and desire. <br />He is a Thought; he is not flesh-and-bone; <br />He is immortal Youth astride a Dream: <br />The hungry flame that eats to ash and stone <br />The gorgeous fruitage of the things that seem; <br />And I (who sand, with pang and toil enough, <br />My roots at last down to the nether springs, <br />Yet, born to coax the shapely from the rough, <br />Have shunned the red and jagged edge of things), <br />A Woman with a bird, a book , a flower, <br />Who, sifting life, has kept the quiet part, <br />Whose days like pearls are sorted, hour by hour - <br />Why is it that he gallops through my heart?<br /><br />Karle Wilson Baker<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/texas-cowboy/
