John Wayne Brings Wyatt Earp a Cup of Coffee

Before he became John Ford’s leading man,
the Duke worked for him in props and got
to meet the Tombstone marshal,
the ancient and real cowboy

who had come to teach tanned actors all his ways
of being real—how to walk while carrying a gun,
how to fall down once hit with a bullet.

I wouldn’t have guessed they could have met,
these different centuries of men
and Wests. As when an older Ovid, on his way

to exile, might have met a teenage Christ
at some crossroads of the empire,
and the epic erotic tragic elegiac poet

locked eyes with the youth in a way
that made the sagebrush whir
and thrum below the signposts
to that big sky country, wild at the borders.