The Grand Dame Of Cowboy Poetry

It’s Saturday morning at the 32 nd National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev., and the Ruby Mountain Ballroom is packed. The introductory applause has faded, but 91-yearold Elizabeth Ebert, “the Grand Dame of Cowboy Poetry,” in gold earrings and a navy blue pantsuit, is still pushing her way across the stage, two wrinkled hands on the walker, slightly stooped, a lariat of oxygen tubes peaking out from a small tank affied to the side. Seated behind her, fellow poets R.P. Smith and Yvonne Hollenbeck, soon to perform themselves, smile as though clued in to some inside joke.

- Carson Vaughan

For a moment, the room is still. A wet cough. A camera shutter. The fish of a turning page. Ebert’s short, white hair catches light as she pulls out her marker and unsteadily flattens her book on the lectern.

“I’m kind of shaky in the morning,” she says. “Kind of shaky at night, too.” The room laughs, is ready to laugh, wants to laugh, because 91-year-old Elizabeth Ebert—that intangible suggestion about her, that wry smile daring you to keep up—commands it. They know Elizabeth, or they think they do. They have or had mothers, grandmothers, a little white-haired aunt who lived on the farm, dutifully supporting her husband, sweet and soft-spoken, a story or two from the range always in the chamber. They’re expecting something funny and something sweet, wrapped in a shawl and rocking back and forth on a creaking pinewood porch. A Sunday yarn. A hard candy.

“Above my basement stairwell is a little cubby hole in which I put junk I don’t know what to do with,” she begins, “and I take the box out every once in a while and I ruffle through it, and one day I found a little notebook that said ‘21st Anniversary.' The poem went like this:

We have reached a majority.

Twenty-one conglomerate years of marriage.

Good times and bad, sickness and health, Joy and sorrow.

Sometimes I’d like to try for twenty-two (Winchester, bolt action right between his eyes.)

This is not what the crowd expected. It’s better. Bolder. It’s more defiant, reflective of the blacklisted Dorothy Parker Ebert once admired, the New York poet and literary critic who once rhymed, in a poem titled “Love Song,”

He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start,

Nor could storm or wind uproot him.

My own dear love, he is all my heart,—