Glacier National Poem by Percy Dovetonsils

Sam Shepard is dead
though I'm still reading
his several collections
of short stories
about horses, fathers,
women, and the Far West.
And now I've just read
a short story
in the New Yorker
by Tom McGuane.
A masterful story
brief and seemingly tossed
off,
also set in the Far West

reminding me
of an overnight
in Great Falls, Montana,
the Black Foot drunks
blowing across the street
like tattered cowboy hats.

The pure water
boiling out of the world's
greatest freshwater spring
just north of town.

The golden eagles
perched on telephone poles
above the double wides
of the Black Foot reservation.

I'm sitting in the backseat
of a rented car
on Going to the Sun Road
listening to a tape
narrating the wonders
of Going to the Sun Road
which Pop, the Colonel, has rented,

and I just can't take any more
and am spoiling for a fight,
the fight I never had
when I got back from Nam
and all Pop would say is,
"Well, it's a can of worms."

And I ask, no demand,
that they please turn off that tape.
And my mother,
not used to being countermanded,
says,
"We can leave you right by the
side of the road, you know."
"Go ahead, do, " I say.
"I'm not a boy any more.
I can hitch to where I need to get."
And Mother sighs and
turns off the tape
and for the first time
I can actually see
what's going on
outside the car.

See the Rockies,
see Montana,
maybe even see a grizzly
loping up a far distant glacier
at incredible speed.

When we finally stop
for gas
I think I can see
a tear
in Pop's eye
- -something I've never seen before.

Here he took the trouble
to invite me on this trip
and I've turned out to be
not at all the man
he dreamed I'd be
when I was
his boy.