Walt McDonald


My Cousin and the Rodeo

I was ten, my bank like a boot
I broke for the coins, the dollar bills.
I gave my cousin's wife a doll

in the hospital, and a jar of chocolates.
She was a mother, now, without a man.
The Brahma had to be shot, leg snapped

when it jumped the wall, fell back
and crushed my cousin in the rodeo.
I saw the baby in the nursery,

my nose fogging the glass. I confess,
I liked it, fog spreading each time I leaned
and breathed. My brother rushed me away

before nurses saw, too young for that floor.
He said our cousin kept the doll on the bed
when she held the baby girl, not named.

She opened the jar so nurses could share
the candy in tin foil, the jar still full
when doctors let her bring the baby home.

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Walt McDonald is the Texas Poet Laureate for 2001. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, and The Southern Review. His most recent book is All Occasions, (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000). Four of his books received Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.