Pulp Western

Portrait of Louis L’Amour by Fred Pfeiffer

 

(Regarding Louis L’Amour)

 

unclean heroes
find dust and mud
mission in antique
morality tales
standing up against
black hearts the
scorched soulless
gunmen of lawless
frontiers leather
loyalties animate
bile and bloodlust
for rustic cut justice

stark panoramas
give stage to droll
sagas of sage and
saguaro red rocks
tower prominent
primitive sentinels
marking old trails
through meandering
canyons dry gulches
where rustlers and
outlaws hole up
between felonies

crude prairie towns
stick built for vice
homely housed
behind false fronted
dens of iniquity
gamblers bordellos
all manner of rogues
painting intrigues
in violent colors
fierce clashes of black
hats with white hats
horse opera clichés

romanticized virtues
play out in saloons
with brass spittoon
etiquettes aces and
eights stained by
gunsmoke and guile
famous figures who
temper the fiction
familiarize history
rowdy raw characters
give great escape
from a dull afternoon

 

 
(Footnote: L’Amour’s novels of the American west have sold more than 200,000,000 copies worldwide)

 

 

From my books Ephemera and Legacies (vol. 2)

Colorless

 

“Man in Black Hat” by David Flam

 

 

any white shirt would do
for a black and white stageplay
as long as I got to recite
my lines wearing my old
soft black cowboy hat
crown-pinched and brim-rolled
like pages of scripts my gray
fingers would worry
again and again line-by-line
word-for-word all to memorize
life in the hope that some
slightest applause
might redeem the dull effort

 

 

(originally posted December 2013)

Oil on Canvas

 

“The Round Up” by Charles Marion Russell

 

 

 

(Regarding Charles Marion Russell)

 

 

Red cloudlets of trail-dirt plume upward from under

Hard galloping hooves of a fifteen-hands paint,

Their noise all but drowned in the rumbling thunder

Of stampeding longhorns, escaped of restraint

 

A river of beef streaming headlong apace

Over featureless ground, relentless, severe,

But with breathtaking vastness of wide open space

Marking Manifest Destiny’s western frontier

 

The rider, secure in a high-cantle saddle,

Works deftly with rein and spur, urging more speed,

While flailing his misshapen hat like a paddle

Against rippling flanks of his muscular steed

 

His neckerchief flies, a white throat-knotted rag,

Its corner tails flick at his leathern, seamed face

Expressive of strain in each masculine crag,

As he struggles to turn this tumultuous race

 

Neat coils of lasso bounce, slapping hide chaps,

As this veteran workhorse responds, well in tack,

To its handler who’s hell-bent for brake to collapse

This feral momentum, then drive the herd back

 

Back to the route, that reliable trail bed

With adequate waters where wild grasses stand,

That leads to the auction pens staged at the railhead

To stockyards that nourish this young hungry land

 

The background is filled by a purpling sky,

Where a lowering sun shoots bright lavender streaks

Across orange-brown mountains whose distant and dry

Treeless contours stand capped by time-flattened peaks

 

The foreground presents a stray bull with a blaze,

Tripped hoof-over-horn by brush brambles of sage,

It thrashes about with a frantic-eyed gaze

In the sorrowful throes of sheer fear and raw rage

 

Implausibly, all of these primitive tensions,

This spirited energy, power, and sweep

Of motion in all of its active dimensions

Are caught, oil on canvas, forever to keep

 

A slice of life verging on violence, dense

With realism laid on with masterful stroke

Conveying the rowdy exuberant sense

Of America’s story that cowboys evoke

 

 

(written in my youth but first posted here June 2013)

 

Pampas

“El Gaucho” by Patrick McDonald

land of the gaucho

that noble mestizo

rustic of legend

free spirited

saddle tramp

canny of clouds who

conceal the horizon

his steed his estate

a skilled horseman

attuned to the

heady percussion

of thundering hooves

red dirt flying

wool poncho ecstatic

in rioting winds

born of speed

an exuberant herd

deftly turned

to his confident will

brought to grazing

the endless green

flats of subcontinent

bathed by bright

temperate blue skies

under Capricorn

knife-wielding

whip-handed icon

exuding machismo

among rich endowments

of borderless culture

the gaucho an emblem

of born independence

a romance of history

bigger than life

cherished source of

indigenous pride

Friends

Print by Will Ford

 

he climbed the split rails
she approached with stately gait
tossed her fine blazed head

the chestnut red dun
playfully nuzzled his neck
he tousled her mane

their wordless language
eye and touch corresponding
trusty affection

mounting her saddle
her sixteen-hands carried him
off to adventure

Sky Pilot

Photo by E. Gaston
From flickr.com

rustic sociopolitical preacher
of hellfire and brimstone bent
rough black suit and roundhat
rode circuits on horseback
swept through the frontier
when this galloping country
was wakeful and wild and new
full of sin piss and vinegar
finding its hardscrabble ethics
one self-driven mind at a time
wolves outnumbering sheep
come a Sunday found chapel
in backrooms saloons or
wherever the trail dust might
settle on opportune gatherings
violent hearts wanting even
some slight validation rogues
seeking some respite some
moments of ease from the rigors
of manifest destiny open to
pastoral sermons that blessed
eye-for-eye ordained red
tooth-and-claw as forgivable
means to secure one’s survival
evangelized balance to justify
ends in these lawless environs
governed by naught but the
six-shooter gun and the cross
an alliance of cowboy and
chaplain against desperados
the soulless the savage all
trained on a building toward
something that someday
would find itself clean again
civilized Christian and fine

Pulp Western

Louis L’Amour
Portrait by Fred Pfeiffer
from fredpfeifferartist.blogspot.com

(Regarding Louis L’Amour)

unclean heroes
find dust and mud
mission in antique
morality tales
standing up against
black hearts the
scorched soulless
gunmen of lawless
frontiers leather
loyalties animate
bile and bloodlust
for rustic cut justice

stark panoramas
give stage to droll
sagas of sage and
saguaro red rocks
tower prominent
primitive sentinels
marking old trails
through meandering
canyons dry gulches
where rustlers and
outlaws hole up
between felonies

crude prairie towns
stick built for vice
homely housed
behind false fronted
dens of iniquity
gamblers bordellos
all manner of rogues
painting intrigues
in violent colors
fierce clashes of black
hats with white hats
horse opera clichés

romanticized virtues
play out in saloons
with brass spittoon
etiquettes aces and
eights stained by
gunsmoke and guile
famous figures who
temper the fiction
familiarize history
rowdy raw characters
give great escape
from a dull afternoon

(Footnote: L’Amour’s novels of the American west have sold more than 200,000,000 copies worldwide)