William Stafford's Lost Gun

I would see it holstered low over his pocket, fiercely slung,
rocking against the thin poetry book, curled and dog-eared,
held in his trigger-calm hand. The bold heel and potent sweep
of his Hutchinson boots walking him always out further
into the quiet inside of open spaces.

His slow Inuit eyes, like mine, in his wind-stark face, paging
over the surfaces of wild rye and switchgrass, river birch and dry
persimmon; his crooked mouth breathing in stones and the laughing
track of coyote; his wild hair covered with no hat like Shane's;
and his gunslinger’s heart, always with one in the chamber.

After you see it awhile, you no longer look, you just know
it’s there, even if it’s not. The day I rolled my hand open
to find that lean Peacemaker in my prairie-flat palm I saw him
walking slow, his holster empty. How long I had held his lost
gun I did not know, nor did I know if he missed it.

He moved as the same wild man without it at his hip. The gravity
of his gun still swung the empty holster in wide vertical arcs
as he walked. The day I found his gun I learned how to shudder.
His consicence served a higher law and he wore no star. Whatever
in his path he objected to was already dead and didn’t know it.

The most dangerous men never even draw.