"The Lulling"

"The Lulling"
Darrel Hammon

They made writing look easy–
Steinbeck, Guthrie, Fisher, Conrad,
Stafford, Hemingway, Twain, and the rest

all huddled around their rivers, drinking
their lines from the weeping willows,
tall cottonwoods, and the howl of coyotes

somewhere in the distant mountains.
At full moon, they stared deep into the orange
until the words rose like tides,

fell crashing onto their tablets.
At times, they drank deep from river bottoms,
sucking in verbs and adjectives,

spewing them upon the crowed page.
Sometimes, sitting among the big roots,
they gleaned periods and commas

so they fit just right like a fade pair of 501's
on a weathered saddle bronc rider.
Then, as morning dawned, their writings

climbed from the darkness of dusk,
settled in the last paragraph where
they lulled us into thinking we were there.

I still search for my river, my weeping willow
where I can sense the motion of the wind,
feel of their moaning and groaning, and then have them

brush up against me like my Siamese
lending me the words, the phrases
they had been hoarding for themselves.