Most summer days, the mountains are opaque,
flat and fuzzy from Visalia, from the irrigated
fields they have become, steaming beneath them—
silt and snowmelt settling into verdant orchards
between a grid of decomposing roads. Too much
close-up to notice where our bounties begin,
the Sierras cease to exist—blurred, faded in the haze.
I was one once, a would-be mountain man, a child
chasing fish upstream to the heavy breathing
of the river and me, of the breeze in cedar dreams,
eyes upon the water, in the eddies along the cutbanks
where all the long, dark shadows I wanted, waited.
Across Chagoopa’s desert sands, a long time camps
within the jingling rhythm of a string of mules,
when a boy begins to talk to himself, tries to be
interesting and honest with nothing but reality
decomposing for steep miles around him. Always
the same, up or down the Big Arroyo, he leaves
part of the conversation there. It marks the trail
where tracks are erased and scent posts wane,
only to be revisited and revived, a lifetime away.
drycrikjournal 