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Furnished Rooms: Cripple Creek
The rock-cluttered creek-bed
of Bennett Avenue is so steep
that hooves stumble and the brake-block
shrills on the wheel all the way down.
The Sisters of Mercy go slowly
up the boardwalk, their eyes
fixed on their dusty shoes
and the cracked planks. Although
the passing hearse is empty, their hands
flutter from brow to bosom.
The butcher's boy wraps prime sirloin
and wipes his hands on his apron.
The stranger passes him
his ivory-handled Colt and says:
That piece cost a hundred dollars, son.
There ain't its like
this side Saint Louis.
In the brown twilight of their room
the Sisters peel the sweaty wimples
from their young faces and toss
their habits onto the clothes-chest.
One kneels now on the bed, fingering
a mandolin, its amber shaft
in her left palm, its deep bowl
in her lap. Sitting at the window,
patterned by its golden panes,
the other rolls her black wool stockings
down to her ankles and clasps
the insides of her thighs.
Between the hanging beef and strips
of fuzzy flypaper the boy
stares a long time at the gun,
weighing it, thumbing its catch.
The ceiling clashes with hooks
on steel rails. While the butcher
slams his cleaver down
through a grinning pink-toothed
sheep's head and, like a lover, runs
his hand down the inside of a beef quarter,
caressing the globed kidney
in its pouch of waxy fat, the butcher's boy
wipes his nose on his wrist, hands back
the gun, and chews at a bloodied hang-nail.
The stranger cocks his eye.
up across the street at a window
that smolders with sunset. He hears
the mandolin. The mountain drools rubble.
The wind scrabbles under the floors
of shanties. The only flowers in town
are made of colorless glass beads
threaded on wreaths of wire
   
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