Monthly Archives: August 2011

We are born to see the light.
Ask the new calf this morning
early, after its first day

of incessant licking while
wobbling along her belly,
to nose the warm bag

swelling with nourishment,
just to close its eyes
when put to bed that first time—

back into that blackness
safe between a fallen limb
and the trunk of an oak tree.

Everything is new and disconnected
when its eyes open again
to see what it smells

or stumbles over, listening
for a voice, always known,
to find her beautiful.

Awaiting daylight, a loose script plays out
between slowing-moving heifers, curious
and confused by so much visiting,

a load of hay for the next female graduates
and a pasture full of bull dreams, early
postures for winter release, bellows

at the feeder while a pump fills a tank,
with the well-worn routines in between—
an hour and a half of darkness and

a good storm of words away. This is not
for the young—way too tame to corral
the blood, the mind, the heart pacing

the gate to a panorama of possibility,
another plane beyond this mundane plod
through days and seasons changing,

our cycles of grass and calves, promises
sure as thick-bodied sycamores cling
to the creek bank, or like cobbles caged

in their tangled roots. Awaiting daylight,
our script unfurls again into the infinite
and moonless black, awaiting rain.

There are places to save
things, spots out of the way
of traffic, dusty cubby holes

for lost loves and high
school victories, close
calls and sweet innocence

             banked like candy,
             forever preserved
             to stay the same.

One day, we clean house
to find all the old words
are now meaningless,

so hackneyed and trite
we can’t employ them
like we used to—so

we throw them away,
leave them in the Good
Will box and hope

they’ll mean something
to someone, fine
words that don’t fit

what we have seen—
or what we feel
when they are gone.

                    Our moccasins do not mark the ground.
                                – William Stafford (“Returned To Say”)

We look for sign on soft ground,
something fresh from the past,
even the glint of a wing in the weeds

to draw us from the dusty track.
No one remembers their names,
all the old men or their sayings—

but they are here behind the page,
this side of tomorrow’s sunrise.
They have set up camp, bedrolls

around a fire, each one helpless
as they survey landscapes shrink
and change a little everyday.

‘He looks, but he just don’t see,’
Tom Homer’d say of someone paid
to ride and look, set fences right

or watch the cattle slip away—
then lay down wagers with gentler
angels to pass his long reward.

Ground they know, riding ridges,
they can see what they want—
be entertained or disappointed

with humanity. We look for sign,
listen for whispers on native ground
from all the characters before us.

                        Our north-sea English needs no such ornament.
                                  – Robinson Jeffers (“Rhythm and Rhyme”)

Yet even that abruptness has worn into Anglo-chants
hummed like radio jingles, empty slogans thumped
under breath as the blood pumps with daily survival,
a far hawk’s cry from the flint and club we took to bed

under the warm skins of animals that no longer rise
in our dreams—crude totems on sabbatical, released
from teaching ways to get along on earth. The pot
has melted now, reduced to new dialects, Everyman

has a pulpit in space above the crowd, another soapbox
in the wilds of our high-tech Hyde Park, another placard
to pack proclaiming God will pull the plug on us all,
soon—to free and cleanse us from our sinful natures.

Soft, homogenized in waves of rhyme and rhythm,
we follow the piper’s flute, await our promised morphine,
believe the clouds can hold our collected weight—
we have no north-sea English left, we speak in song.

                                The old granite forgets half a year’s filth…
                                                – Robinson Jeffers (“November Surf”)

The sweep of leaves, the track erased,
first winter storm – spring’s discarded
petals, summer’s seed, and September’s

discontent raked into the earth await
Pacific passion from whence we’ve come—
to rely upon—it pumps in arteries.

Even the old veins swell with anticipation,
dry flesh craving streams, runoff flushed
in rivulets, old slate clean again—the only

promise that may bear fruit despite the lies
of men. Her scent upon wind gusts,
we prepare and pray for rare extremes—

all the damp furies inhaled, the sweet
smell of storm, and after-rain of molding
green—to renew our vows and begin again.