The Last of John Ringo
by Emma Bull
by Emma Bull
You were dead, all but the bullet.
Was there a shining, sober moment,
A choice, a rightness,
Like the one between the trigger pulled
And the target struck,
When the end seemed the only, perfect one?
Last waltz, last chord, and home in the moonlight?
Or was it disarray on discord--
One thing forgotten, another misplaced,
A third mishandled, a fourth dropped unheeded--
Until your life, continued,
Would have been bootless, horseless,
A cartridge belt upside down:
Fool’s motley for a dying boomtown?
There was water in the mines.
There was no next town,
No next good game.
The sunset only day’s end,
Not a curtain before the next grand act,
Not a promise to ride on toward.
So you chose, or the gods chose for you.
Untidy life, snagged to knots with other lives,
Gives way at last to one smooth course of myth.
From your black-oak wayside seat
It was a snarl beyond your picking-out.
But those who lived dug channels for your past,
Made art of you,
And art makes sense.
So crude despair or drunk mischance gave place
To murder: thundering vengeance come at last.
That’s an end that makes a tale;
That’s a villain makes a hero.
The point of all your restless, angry life
Was that it ended. Choice, chance, or retribution:
How would you have lived, knowing your dead man’s fame?
A final joke: the boomtown survived.
It breathes now as a place you’d not have lived in,
But dead, you are a model citizen,
Necessary, as all coins have two sides.
To those who want forever for their names
You say, “Choose big enemies, and hope for bigger lies.
Then sit down by the road.”
You were dead. But not for long.