When Butch and Sun Dance shot from their corner,
Firing from the hip with each hot cylinder,
Then froze into a sepia still, the movie
Chilled the bones of a coloured story.
Legend says they sallied forth against an army,
But history says Butch Cassidy
Shot the taller Sun Dance and himself,
Then tumbled in some grave in high Bolivia -
A close-up of two icons of the century
Zooms dustily to long shots of a cemetery.
A grave where bodies since have slowly piled
Above, around - Andean villagers , of course,
A Swede, a German, recently a child,
Excites an archeologist who must,
Beside a squat, flat-thighboned Indian,
Crouch and poke and probe in coffined dust
To find just where those dry bones lie,
Hoping to identify a round-thighed European,
Grinning still through high-grade dentistry,
As the dead-shot Kid or his side-kick Cassidy.
They find a skull, drilled through above the eye,
And guess it may be Sun Dance. Rapidly
They sift away as fragments testify
To cowboy boots and belt; send off for DNA
From the yellow root of a finely honed,
Gold-crowned tooth of some big-boned,
Grinning gunslinger, to discover, finally,
It fits no root of a hair from the head
No DNA of members dead - or alive -
Of the Kid’s own brother’s family.
In the rare Bolivian air,
A spade jars on an epitaph -
In Friede Ruhet they decipher.
Near miss our heroes laugh,
Some counterfeit German must
have made his final play
before he bit the dust.
The hole in the head’s not ours, they say.
By a hair’s breadth
and the skin of a tooth
Our heroes make their getaway.
And no one asks the reason why
An unknown skull has one more eye.
©Terry Hodgson2020
Comments