Daniel Wenger

**1 / Meeting Burt**



Burt Lancaster and I don’t

have much to die for: love

of the game and the gold

and the girl not as much 



makes simple to say she’s not

beautiful, perpetually

never quite undressed,

dusty and sweaty under

that scarf, her dress, her

face, wide plain, blessed

expanse glistening daily

above breasts long fought



for, Burt and I, too old

now to care about love.





**2 / Losing Burt**



The tropes gather faster when Burt appears,

he’s lost craps and a woman, broke and rebuffed, 

smirking and grumbling that humans make love

face to face, a remark worthy of some score-

settling cowboy in spurs, not you, Burt, your

single regard for time and rock blown rough

in one moment’s furnace of sticks, sweaty, buffed,

refusing objection your fusework near blears

human loss so unsavory

                                               I’m lost, Burt,

can’t tell your face features through the sure

group’s tactics and horses, making calm

ill-advised, more fitting to flail and blurt

guilt in tumid air that soaks these shores

without oceans,

                              Your hand is creased without a palm.





**3 / Replacing Burt (On Seeing a Different Western)**



Burt and I have had a falling out

I say loud, hoping after a reaction,

eyeing with verve and meaning my now

and new loved outlaw, lanky Gary. Faction



different this time, clean-shaven and freshly

married, on the run not from the long

law but the lawless. Blonde-sweet Miss Kelly

headstrong and stupid—seems he’s on the wrong

 

side of her Quaker complaints. He stays to greet

a death mimed by cruel schoolboys. A crime

for their sake. Boys scatter. Streets empty. Smutty heat,

smutty Gary beneath the Marshall sign,



moral and certain, leather and tallow.