Inviolable
by Sean Sexton
9/6
It’s my lost sister’s birthday month. Is it in two more days or
twelve? It doesn’t matter much I suppose. There has been a
cooling, the sky’s seasonal change from hard-bitten light.
Fuck Jeff! —I told my buddy last night; soon to turn fifty—I’m
nineteen years older than you, how the hell did that happen? I
might have added: If we’re lucky, I’ll be your octogenarian friend.
I have many. We’re stowing a broken-legged bull named Ribeye in
the cow pens these ending days of summer. We fed him up close over
a week’s time, shut him there to stay until we haul him to the butcher.
The wean is over, corral empty and a feeling of aftermath pervades.
A last trough we didn’t need in the fields for the calves, remains in
the top lot where we feed the broken bull. So he’s graduated from
the woods to this waiting room, two years since he was injured, judged
unsaleable—our inattention afforded him all this time—spiriting out of
the way places, deeps where we barely kept track of him.
Calls have been placed, things about him discussed and made certain,
time now grown hard for his case. I can barely let myself think of this.
Given a choice, I’d leave him to haunt the shadows forever.
Sean Sexton was born in Indian River County and grew up on his family's Treasure Hammock Ranch. He divides his time between managing a 700-acre cattle operation, painting, and writing. He is author of two chapbooks, and three full volumes of poetry: Blood Writing, Poems, Anhinga Press, 2009, and May Darkness Restore, Poems, Press 53, 2019, and Portals, Poems, Press 53, 2023. He performs regularly at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV, and is on the faculty of the 2024 Southeastern Writers Assn. Conference on St. Simon's Island, GA in June . He was nominated for a 2020 and 2021 Pushcart Prize and received a FL Individual Artist’s Fellowship in 2001. He's a board member of the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation and founding event chair of their Annual Poetry and Barbeque held each April, now in its fifteenth year. He also co-founded Poetry and Organ Advent and Lenten Concert Series at Community Church in Vero Beach, FL featuring nine concerts annually attracting poets from all over the US. He became inaugural Poet Laureate of Indian River County in 2016.
