Creative Writing Sample: After the Death of a Cowboy Poet

This poem is a creative writing sample and was published in a book of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry pieces dedicated to our retiring professor and written by her former students.

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For Dr. Mary Brown, for doubting me to literary death and then pulling me through.

I was twenty-two when I found myself in a morgue,

gazing into the brushed stainless steel of an autopsy table.

Some semblance of me hovered in the metal,

a blob of pink behind drips of dried blood.

He—aren’t corpses in body bags always he?—

he was zipped up. Two pointed feet,

like cowboy boots poked up through

his bag in the chilled drawer.

I did not see his name.

A cowboy in the Midwest. [A cowboy in the morgue.]

how did he get here? [how did I get here?]

Perhaps he had died for truth

and I was there for beauty, to find the words

of a poem lost by summer travels, college diplomas, real jobs

in hospitals with benefits, wheeled office chairs and name badges.

Perhaps I might lie down and listen

to the silent poetry of the dead.

I learned poetry from the dead anyway,

the phrases of Wilde and Dickinson—

walks with Frost and Stevens,

and drips of words like hot wax from cummings.

Bukowski was wrong about poetry readings—

the saddest damned thing ever was

leaning on a refrigerator, talking

in my head to a dead, unnamed cowboy.

He never spoke,

but I heard him say everything about surrender,

opportunity, and life after twenty-two. I will write more poetry.