Scene from an Imaginary Western

The valley slides off the hillsides
and bottoms out, flat and riverless.
Dry-gulching they called it from
under stetsons white and black
- and it looks a likely place of ambush.
Purple sage on distant slopes
lacks only riders to lend it
iconography.

And yet this isn't Montana, New Mexico
-or yet any Western mythagora-
but Malaga in winter.
Walking through the rutted mud
in the cool valley bottom,
I tip my imaginary ten-gallon hat
to the campesino high in the saddle.