With plenty of moisture, the winter buckeye balls have germinated and taken root beneath the trees in Greasy. Most won’t survive the summer sun. Branding the last bunch of calves this a.m. Hallelujah!
Sampling of yearling heifers bred to the Wagyu bulls, Snake River Farms, to begin calving mid-August.
Fog upon the creek, a low cloud
clings to sycamores without leaves
beneath dark emerald hills at dawn.
Naked limbs emerge after a night’s
rain, then alternately withdraw as if
dancing with an undulating throng
secreted within a gray veil, a pantheistic
affair – a steamy, primeval revisiting
of First Light and the creation of things.
Strange new world and fresh beginning,
our pristine hope inhabited by others,
jubilant for an instant – but not quite like us
as the cloud moves upstream, leaving
their tangle frozen outside my mind –
as the creek mumbles me back to life.
Posted in Poems 2011
We have hammered-out forgiveness,
made it malleable upon the anvil, until
our last strokes ring no more of blame
and we are free to forge our own
self-reliance. We can choose
the shape of it, etch baroque design,
inlay silver, or let wear speak for itself,
quietly. Some will never feel the wild
clutch and release – be never tested
and yet well-made to hang on walls,
glint in parades and be called art – but
best to hold them all on a loose rein.
for Joe Bruce & Merlyn
Posted in Poems 2011
No telling how the Sierras leak
along the granite cracks and fissures
over ranges and across canyons
to make a seep and fill a trough
for all nearby – button willow, buckeye.
Along as many imperfections as
cracked glass, cobwebbed beneath
this thin coat of clay cut by seams
of shale. Old timers claimed it took
a year for snow to recharge springs
gone dry, a slowing leak downhill
in droughts. Some move around,
pool up or down canyon with the shifting
of the fractured while others become camp
sites, wild tracks in mud, gossip rocks
carved with stone, places with names
for centuries, stories come and gone
where cattle drink, make their homes.
drycrikjournal 