Watering Hole
                (Summer in Wolf, Wyoming, 1980)
  
 “Who are we?”
 “What are we?”
 “Why are we?”
                Glenda Jackson,
                on Shakespeare’s central questions
                Vogue, April 2019
  I.
  
Here in the heat and scrub of high plateau
 a woman could wander for weeks without
 seeing another soul. Just thirst and woe
 for company. A shirt, soft jeans, and stout
  
 boots, maybe a knife? I was twenty, so
 clueless. What could be more tame than this, outpost
 of  wild western vibe, the dude ranch? Oxbow
 curve of cabins along Wolf Creek, evening bouts
  
 of drinking by guests, mountains blocking low
 stars at twilight. That summer, consumed by doubts,
 mood-clouded, I waited tables, would go
 as far as I could, between meals, on foot.
  
 For true escape, there was Sheridan, by car:
 jukebox, laconic cowboys, the Mint Bar.
  
 II.
  
 At the Goodwill, I bought a hat, stained band
 of leather inside, stiff crown and low brim;
 tooled boots; a gold pocket watch for my hand
 when it wanted weight. I wouldn’t think of him.
  
 Pretender that I was, the raw, wind-grooved land
 set life in high relief. One dusk, at the red rim
 of a rise in the road, I spied some tan
 skin, a line of crushed spine. I saw I could skim
  
 off part with my pocket knife, take the end
 of the snake with me, circumvent venom. 
 I thought I could keep the rattle and bend
 its music into protection, however grim.
  
 Faithless lover, sharper than serpent’s tooth.
 I swore to write to him, to sing the truth.
  
 III.
  
 All summer, I’d tried not to think of the man
 I loved the way a thundercloud will cling
 to its rain, refusing even one drop to land.
 Now words tumbled out in gusts, outpouring 
  
 onto the dry page. I addressed it by hand,
 licked a stamp, sent it off, then went striding
 to the corral. Just then, a horse limped in, shunned
 by its herd. For two days, she'd been expiring
  
 in a wet bog, mired to her neck. A ranch hand,
 with his rope and mount, pulled her out. Trying,
 step by painful step, to reach the trough and
 drink, she did it. Dazed, she managed to stand.
  
 I was done with waiting. I had a poet’s creed.
 I returned to college packing a tumbleweed.
  
  Leslie Schultz 

Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday! The trio of Shakespearean sonnets I wrote this morning is, as they say, “based on a true story….” I spent the summer between my junior and senior years of college at Eaton’s Ranch, the oldest dude ranch in the world. It is beautiful and sometimes desolate country, there in the shadow of the Big Horn Mountains near the borderline between Wyoming and Montana. I learned a lot about myself that summer.

And it was in Sheridan, in a little book store, that a stranger first asked me if I were a poet. Heart pounding, voice quavering, I felt compelled to answer “Yes, I am.” I walked out of the store with a book filled with the metaphors of collective nouns called An Exhaltation of Larks by James Lipton, and uplifted by a sense of true vocation that has sustained me over four decades. I feel very lucky to have found an abundance of loving people in my life, but, no matter what, I have my sense of myself and my work.

That was also the summer I started taking not just snapshots but aiming for real photographs. (As the incredible work from others, above, shows, I still have a lot to learn! I shall never stop trying, though.) Below are some of the images from that long-ago summer, and one of the watch, taken this morning.

Wishing you an iambically happy ramble through Shakespeare’s Birthday, 2019! LESLIE

P.S. If any of you are lucky enough to see Glenda Jackson and Ruth Wilson in the current production of King Lear, do let me know!