Sample Poems by Robert Cooperman
The Ranch Wife Reminisces About
How She and Her Husband Met
His truck broke down
on a stock-buying trip,
and when he ambled
into Dad’s store
for a replacement hose,
my breath seized up
like I’d been hit
in the gut with a football.
But I acted like freezing
run-off at his heller good looks
that probably never met
a female didn’t swoon
at his dark hair,
eyes like lightning flashes,
and the corkscrew scar
on his jaw that made me
want to reach out and draw
all the anger from it.
He walked out with the part,
but pivoted like a sergeant
on parade; and almost
as tongue-tied as if staring
at a Hollywood actress,
stammered, “You think,
maybe you’d want
to get to know
each other a whole lot better?
His uncertainty so touching,
my mouth dropped wider
than a cantaloupe half.
Finally, I nodded
like those bobblehead toys
I’ve always hated.
The Ranch Wife Remembers the Smell
of Sweetgrass
At our wedding
after the country quartet
had snapped shut
their instrument cases
and driven off,
Rick burned a braid
of dried sweetgrass:
blessing the happy lifetime
we’d have together.
“Close your eyes,”
he smiled, “and tell me
what it smells like,”
the grasses hissing
with a perfume
of cold, starry nights.
We kissed and waltzed
to the same song
we heard in our heads,
the aroma of prairie grass
sweeter than my glimpses
of the Northern Lights.
I close my eyes, now,
and relive that night:
our four-poster festooned
with wildflowers,
Rick and me so starry in love
we gave strange, secret
names to the constellations
when we stood by the window,
wrapped in one blanket
and each other’s arms,
still smelling that love knot
of sweet prairie grass.
Cora Myers Confronts Ellen Gooden
Months After the Latter’s Wedding
to Rick
You may’ve roped
the handsomest man
in the county, but Rick’s
got the attention span
of a kid in the world’s
biggest toy store:
a miracle I kept him
through high school.
You were coyote smart,
pretending no interest in him.
And being from far off
made you his mystery woman.
But mark my words, honey,
if he says he’s going
to the grain elevator
or to meet a cattle buyer
or to the bank or the café—
bet on it, he’ll be with me.
Head back to wherever
you came from
and save yourself
a world of heartache.
The Ranch Wife Thinks of the Beef
Business
When I first married Rick,
he took me to a slaughterhouse:
“So you’ll know how our cattle go
from cropping sweetgrass
to being steaks and hamburger.”
I winced to hear the bellowing,
men with hammers waiting
patient as baseball sluggers;
the stink of blood, feces, and fear
smacked me in the face
like waves of flocks
panicked into the air.
I tipped like we were raft-shooting
down the Roaring April River
in full spate, and thought
of turning vegetarian,
or fasting forever, like a Buddhist.
But I can tuck into a T-bone now,
like I was a born carnivore, which I was.
Though Mom picked out our meat
wrapped in clean plastic, she’d tell me
about accompanying her mother
to the butcher shop, and watching—
aprons bloody as battlefield surgeons—
as men hacked sides of beef into steaks.
Mom declared it was like sculptors
tracing figures in quarried marble.
When passing tourists hold their noses
at the stink of cattle, I want to tell them,
“This is what real folks eat.
Don’t like it? Go back to Boulder
and stuff yourselves on veggie dogs.”
Good Lord,
I’ve become Rick’s mouthpiece,
without even realizing it.
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