Preemption

Say we’d met in 1884 —

back when the West was still something

you could file paper on, stake up, 

hold five years and keep.

I’d have been the same man, roughly.

A clerk. A ledger. A bad back.

Ink on the heel of my hand,

squinting at a column

that never quite closed.

You’d have come to the counter

for stamps, or flour, or to mail a letter east

to whomever you knew before me,

and I’d have written the amount wrong,

twice — because you smelled like rain

crossing a county that hadn’t had any

in a month.

Some of it would have been stronger.

No exits. A marriage then

was a fence you built

and stood inside of.

We’d have worked the same forty acres

till our hands matched, mine and yours:

a cracked map.

You don’t leave the man who keeps you fed.

So it wasn’t romance, but just another balance sheet

that happens to breathe.

And some of it would be weaker.

You’d have buried me, most likely —

a fever, a horse, some stranger’s debt

squared up with a gun in the street —

or I’d have buried you, which is worse,

in October, in ground that fought the shovel,

a preacher I didn’t believe

saying words over the one word

I never got around to.

There’d be no photographs.

Well, one. Maybe. A tintype.

You holding still for the long exposure,

holding your breath the way

the man under the black cloth said to,

blurring anyway,

some part of you refusing the frame

the way you still do,

the way I’ve got ten thousand shots of you now

and not one that holds you.

And the songs you hum over the sink —

that easy Sunday soul, all that soft Marvin, Etta, the Supremes…

none of it would exist yet.

You’d get hymns. Whatever the fiddler knew.

I’d have nothing to hand you

but the sound of my own throat,

which has never once been enough,

in any century.

the West would’ve made me harder.

A man who loved you in provision —

a full woodpile, a fence that held,

your name in the family Bible

and almost never in the air between us.

Out there, love was a verb you performed

and didn’t narrate.

You stayed alive together,

for the whole sentence, no parole.

But I got this century.

And this version of me won’t shut up.

I tell you over coffee, in the car,

for no occasion, at the wrong volume,

until the words go soft with handling

like a bill that’s been folded and passed around too many times —

and some nights I lie there certain

the frontier version of me, strong and silent,

spending the word once in forty years,

made it land harder than I ever will.

the mercy isn’t lost on me —

that I drew the century that lets me

say it, and say it, and say it.

The West would’ve given me one shot.

One deathbed sentence. Weighted like a stone.

I got infinite. Cheap. Renewable.

And I still can’t tell, most nights,

whether infinite lands any softer

than the one thing said once

and built to last.

I keep filing the same claim

on land that’s already mine.

Morning after morning. The same three words.

Proving up on this claim

I know nobody would ever dare jump —

because the saying was never really for you.

It was for the part of me

that still can’t believe

this is all mine.