Five Star Ranch Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The elk are starving,
And the rivers are growing bold.

Novice wolves are practicing
On latchkey children discombobulated
On the red saddle,

Eerily tall gentlemen avoid speakeasies,
Brush their heads through the anorexic pines
Where the wind is coughing,

The hills make a dry and cricketing cauldron
Where the opaque cattle swirl, their horns christened with barbed wire,
They turn and turn with strange instinct summoning potions,

The gyre of skeletons rises in the roofless caravanserai,
And baptize the heads of uneasy tramps with the spitless drool:
Their home is under the weathercock which

Is turning like a little girl pretending to dance,
As the hateful eye burns spots of forest fire which ring
Rounded stones and clutches of rattlesnakes,

While magnificent gravestones crowd to the east,
Entire families waiting for the redeeming plough to unearth
From the expectant sorrows these tuberous crops.