OLD SONG

I used to be the one leaving them sedentary
when I headed ever and often out to the west
a sunshine rider whom their lorn thinking prodded on
I used to be leaving them sedate

this time you have made the trail to Wyoming your own
I am the one abandoned to condominiums
I miss you with a lump in the rawhide whole of me
that won’t be going down tomorrow

 

Rodney Nelson’s work started appearing in mainstream print a long time ago, then he switched to fiction and did not come back as a poet until this decade. He has worked as a copy editor and lives in the Great Plains.