Your father worked Drumheller while you ate and slept at home.
He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books
you never knew he read. He sat until his eyes strained to know
what the prairie insisted he must see. Once he found a hoodoo,
toppled after centuries of reaching beyond the flattened earth
we all become and remembering that, once, it was a mountain.
He stripped naked and coated himself with spit and dirt,
arched his back into the rocks and let his speckled shoulders
fade under mud, until his whole body became that colour.
When he dressed himself again, jeans over earth-caked legs,
he walked back to the lease, and danced and prayed for the well to flow.
Your father worked Drumheller while you ate and slept at home,
he stalked the badlands with his shotgun and a pack of smokes.