Continental Divide

It's the West in your voice.
I understand

though I've lived always in crowds,
never escaping schtetl life,
even two generations later
in America, promise handed down
from brave young grandfathers
journeying past the edge
of another culture
until they transformed
to proper old European Yenkees
in fine suits with vests, hats.

My poems coast down avenues.
My muse struts grand fashion
or peers from tenement windows
writing wary East Coast poems
in hotel rooms, painting spatters
on word-washed city streets
alive at midnight
full of beep and flim-flam neon blink.

Not you.
Your poems swin in clear streams,
pan for gold off dirt trails
that lead to meadows
full of morning frost and whinny,
cabins and overgrown logger roads.

Your vistas unfurl above rivers,
and the distant ocean surrounds you
like a gentleman cowhand
with a six-shooter in one hand,
and a renaissance overflowing
the other.