Blood Colt

We walked between barns in the rodeo grounds
out to the Indian rings on the Oldman River
and she was seventeen and I was, is how
I remember in that graceless way I have. A kid,

inaccurate, a green stem, with everything to prove
and nothing to be but a giver of kisses,
the sky as empty and clean of promise
as these stone tipi rings, without the skins

that shelter and weigh down a grown man: memory
a boat on the shallow Oldman River,
cutting through rock to some sweetgrass land,
under an ancient hunters' ridge.

~Kaladar~