| The Rooster Then Pancho Villa rode into town-- with his black guns and white spurs and the dust never quite catching up to him. He ate and drank and slept and seemed profoundly without care, until a rooster, diseased, ugly, bedraggled, wandered into the courtyard and called to the sun. The sleeping outlaw started and stood and shot- the glass out of a window, the knob off a door, then, finally, the starving chicken. We saw then, amongst glass and dust and blood and feathers in his eyes and his smile and his hand that did not shake, the price he had paid. (I lifted the first line from a Raymond Carver poem.) |