CURTAIN CALL: THE CAMERAMAN

This poem, a late addition to The Horse Opera, I wrote to commemorate a 34th wedding anniversary, composed in my head while dancing with my wife in the shallow end of a hotel resort pool to the tune of "The Streets of Laredo", in the High Tatras, in Slovakia, where everybody wears blue jeans, jeans jackets and smokes Marlboros.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

30 years and 4 tornadoes hence,

The Cowboy's Mom and the Cowgirl's Dad

Are splitting hairs

About what is love and what is lust

And who will "forget and forgive"

The other first.

Slow fade

As the couple, now grandmama

And grandpapa, settling down

Before a split log fire, embrace.

As the Cameraman acknowledges the applause of a usually

silent audience, someone throws an American Beauty rose at his

feet. He bows, picks up the rose, and exits, stage right,

leaving the audience staring forever at the many ads on the

tattered and torn, technicolored asbestos Fire Curtain.

                                         Štrbské Pleso, 1994