A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Munseetown

(for Garnet Drown Bertram)

In Lindley Park Cemetery
The tourists are attracted there,
Treading softly, carefully,
Reading what the stones declare:
Beneath this stone are my son’s bones
Drowned in the Yellowstone.

The Twee, the Doon, the Yellowstone,
These deeps that fill the cemetery
Age upon age of runéd bones.
The wash and ruck are silted there,
The Wapahani and the Wolf declare
Yielding their dead who did not tread carefully.

I am reminded of you treading carefully
In Munseetown, far from the Yellowstone
Where we find garnets that themselves declare
Your presence here, here in this cemetery
In the high western noon we talk of you there;
Then grown stone quiet, go and throw the bones

In Walker’s Saloon to see who buys. The bones
Of hornéd beasts (who did not tread carefully)
Killed for their meat stare starkly there,
Stare past Main Street toward the Yellowstone.
After the hart, the bier. Cemetery
Thoughts as unrequited songs of cowboy love declare.

An ancient cowboy tells me: “I declare,
I sometimes feel a misery in my bones
That I’m not with them in the cemetery,
My old gone pals.” Slowly, carefully,
He limps away. The Yellowstone
Rolls on. Star-flare and dusk descend there.

Once in Miller’s Tavern (drowing out sorrows there),
You and I noodled at what life might declare
And I showed you a ring, a yellow stone
That graced a pianist’s hand, arrested bone
That once arpeggioed so carefully
Wrought ivories brought from Africa’s cemetery.

There we were, Garnet, koaning our broken bones,
Whiskeyed, declaring we should have trod more carefully,
Laughing like the Yellowstone that rolls by Lindley Park Cemetery.