“The Round Up” by Charles Marion Russell
(Regarding Charles Marion Russell)
Red cloudlets of trail-dirt plume upward from under
Hard galloping hooves of a fifteen-hands paint,
Their noise all but drowned in the rumbling thunder
Of stampeding longhorns, escaped of restraint
A river of beef streaming headlong apace
Over featureless ground, relentless, severe,
But with breathtaking vastness of wide open space
Marking Manifest Destiny’s western frontier
The rider, secure in a high-cantle saddle,
Works deftly with rein and spur, urging more speed,
While flailing his misshapen hat like a paddle
Against rippling flanks of his muscular steed
His neckerchief flies, a white throat-knotted rag,
Its corner tails flick at his leathern, seamed face
Expressive of strain in each masculine crag,
As he struggles to turn this tumultuous race
Neat coils of lasso bounce, slapping hide chaps,
As this veteran workhorse responds, well in tack,
To its handler who’s hell-bent for brake to collapse
This feral momentum, then drive the herd back
Back to the route, that reliable trail bed
With adequate waters where wild grasses stand,
That leads to the auction pens staged at the railhead
To stockyards that nourish this young hungry land
The background is filled by a purpling sky,
Where a lowering sun shoots bright lavender streaks
Across orange-brown mountains whose distant and dry
Treeless contours stand capped by time-flattened peaks
The foreground presents a stray bull with a blaze,
Tripped hoof-over-horn by brush brambles of sage,
It thrashes about with a frantic-eyed gaze
In the sorrowful throes of sheer fear and raw rage
Implausibly, all of these primitive tensions,
This spirited energy, power, and sweep
Of motion in all of its active dimensions
Are caught, oil on canvas, forever to keep
A slice of life verging on violence, dense
With realism laid on with masterful stroke
Conveying the rowdy exuberant sense
Of America’s story that cowboys evoke
(written in my youth but first posted here June 2013)
