On Antelopes and Beats in Wyoming
A Poem by Burt Bradley
They used to have to go fast,
thoughtless as an empty headed buddha,
but not careless, never careless,
just fast and hard. For burroughs
and jack it was nothing
but edges (the Angle Bar),
corners, and everything concrete
and so vertical the sky not high enough.
Thank God for that round road.
I dig it here where it’s easy being beat,
but not fast, not mindless, but no mind,
antelope mind, all that speed perfectly still
in the middle of the pure horizontal,
as far as an elephantine eye can see,
forever at least and careful.
In the alfalfa now of summer
blooms the bone lotus of winter,
so, we never go light, always a pair
of long-johns in the pickup—polypropylene
like the hairs on the antelope’s flanks:
tubal and erect in July to catch a breeze,
or December laying it down, double layering
when icicles hang like crystal crucifixes,
so cool in the dead blue air.
Burt Bradley (he/him) lives on a bluff in Northwest Wyoming seventy miles from Yellowstone National Park. For over thirty years, with his wife Janet, a photographer, he has delved into the wild serenity of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. His writing has appeared in Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region, Michigan Quarterly Review, Best of Writers at Work, among others. He is currently professor emeritus at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming, where he taught Writing in the Wild classes in Yellowstone and the Southwest Desert.
