* A rodeo poem by Rod Miller *
It happened
in nineteen and seventy-three,
the twenty-third day of June. It was a Saturday night, under the lights and a quarter of the waning moon. Nary a cloud was in the sky, the stars burned clear and bright, sixty-nine degrees, a hint of a breeze; for rodeo, a near-perfect night. Pawing the bottom of chute number three stood a horse, fifteen hands two, the number 16 read on his hip clean, burned in hair a rich, roan blue. A white star winked on his forehead through a forelock tangled and long; a mane of black, a stripe down his back, dark bottoms on legs thick and strong. He rattled the slide gate with a solid kick when the flank man hooked the strap and kept up the fight as the rigging pulled tight, relieving chute boards of pineknots and sap. Finally the cowboy nodded his face and the gate cracked open, then wide. Off flew his hat as 16 whipped out flat and took a run with a choppy stride. He planted his forefeet and sucked it back after covering fifty-three feet. The cowboy’s nose advanced past his toes, but he managed to keep his seat. Then that big blue roan jumped straight up, must have been nine feet in the air, he bellered and roared, lifted off twice more; liked to bucked off all his white hair. Next he spun to the left four turns and a half, got that cowboy away from his hand, down in the well where he hung for a spell while looking for a place to land. 16 trotted off with his head in the air, nostrils flared and tail flying straight; followed the course of a bay pickup horse out back through the catch pen gate. It was as fine a display of the bucking art as this fan ever has seen; I’ve watched hundreds pitch, the best of which was that blue roan, number 16. The cowboy’s name? I can’t recall. Wish I could, but memory fails. That rodeo, you know, was a long time ago. You can’t expect me to remember details.
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* Rod Miller, 2004
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