Monthly Archives: June 2012

He will be hard to ship,
push up the chute, sun
glinting off the aluminum

some early morning soon—
to prod with whistles,
pokes and hollers,

confused for the first time
since he was a calf.
He wants to be

our pet forever, all
eight hundred pounds
within his blue roan hide.

1.

They come to recognize me now,
weaned calves around the feeder
as I unfold bales of leafy alfalfa,

watching busy hands and the attitude
of my hat, slowly lifting downcast
eyes to ask, ‘How’re we doing?’

Startling at first, this all-inclusive
‘we’—the clouds of grasshoppers,
swarms of bugs, the late spring rains.

                                        ~

2.

                    I slip off in 100-degree heat
                    with a Kubota-load
                    to change my water
                    on the pasture
                    because we can’t
                    do it all when it’s cool.

                    Gray Whiskers.
                    Old Scaly Face,
                    layer after layer
                    of new peels away

                                        in that zone
                                        near delirium

                    where we ignore the sun,
                    they like statues crowded
                    ‘round Old Shirttail Out—

                                        gravity, always
                                        gravity pushing
                                        my pants down,
                                        pulling at my flesh,
                                        wanting it back.

                                        ~

3.

If they were people,
I’d tidy-up,
unbuckle and unbutton,
start over again,
but this is how they see me:

                                                            something

consistent and congruent
they can trust
since losing mamas
they have forgotten
in this brave new world.

                                                             Suddenly they turn.
                    I stop. They come back toward me,
                    my window open to the glorious smell of horses.
                    I’m asking the gods to see them home.
                                        – Jim Harrison (“Night Creatures”)

Busy—Lord knows the gods stay busy in the wild,
or on the edge of it down country roads, day or night,
saving a snake or feeding a squirrel to black buzzards.

They tend to favor believers and seldom look
for converts with hands already full, and some
will work against you when you lose your compassion.

Sometime last night waiting for cars to pass,
a Barn Owl left his fencepost too late for an illuminated
mouse, swooped too low, too close to the lights

headed down the road. It’s a game, you know,
taking advantage of humans, and the gods love it—
love leaving little lessons like owl feathers.

In the dark, the raccoons have taken a page
from the coyote’s book: one to lead the dog off
to bark farther in the distance, while the rest

dine in the fruit trees. The news from Wall Street
is not unique when it interrupts our sweet dreams
of an apricot pie—just before we go back to sleep.

                                    I have been over the water
                                    and lived there all alone.
                                            – William Stafford (“Looking Across the River”)

Perhaps it was Ike Clark, decades
after he stepped off the train
in Exeter from Tennessee,

barefoot in bibs looking for work—
or the shack he shared with goats
and chickens, roosters crowing

in the citrus grove he earned.
I never saw a woman, though
he had grandkids that sometimes

waited with us at the stop sign
for the school bus, where he’d pass
early on his way home, alone

in his green, ‘52 Chevy heaped
with vegetables from the alley
behind the red brick Safeway

to feed his menagerie, horse, pigs
and a milk cow in makeshift pens
you could barely see from the road.

Millionaire hermit, he may as well
lived across the river, his flock
of guinea sentries scratching

beneath his orange trees,
the hollow and empty sounds
of peacocks crying at dawn.