I heard a man
In cowboy clothes
Singing songs
Of life and love

His dazzling sequins and heartbroken stanzas
Boasted mythical tales
Of peyote drifters, hickory winds
And moon-studded shrines

Shrines in the woods around Waycross
Where the words of Flannery and Faulkner
Still drift through the purple swamps
And offer up penance to the moss at midnight

Shrines in the neon river
Of blinking Broadway lights
And the way Hank’s ghost
Yet graces the Ryman stage every dusk

Shrines deep in the desert
Spiraling up in the smoke
Of the cowboy’s last lament
Toward that great gig in the sky

(His ashes sinking like broken glass
Into a horizon
Illuminated by the City of Angels
One hundred miles to the west)

I heard a man in cowboy clothes
Back in my younger days
He stirred to life an old time sound
Within my homesick soul