And then
it was over, all the overlapping crescendos
of the latest news, a little bit left at each gate
beginning at the asphalt without a white line
widened, years back, when the gravel trucks
broke it up, raped the upstream channel, felled
sycamores born before Sir Francis Drake
claimed the California coast for Queen Elizabeth—
bleeding stumps of thick-trunked men and women
collapsed on their sides, no longer reaching out
to shade above and underground, high-graded
for the freshest alluvium and leaving an ugly,
150-acre pit in her breast, extracting her soul
before they went belly-up, the decade-old scar
haired-over now with willows and mule fat
like a generic, flat land creek.
April left
some of it with the horned bulls looking for bales
of alfalfa to rub off the truck, and by the second gate
her eyes fixed upon the creek and the colors
of Wood Ducks hustling their broods upstream.
She stopped in the crossing, listening to the rush
of water between her wheels as they disappeared
into the weeds along the bank.
By the third gate,
the rock face of Terminus Dam loomed
beyond the flat across the Kaweah canyon,
the only straight line this side of Blue Ridge
and the Great Divide, its control tower and space age
hydro plant and poles as the last attempt to train
and harness the whims of weather like a reliable
horse under the wildest of circumstances.
At Belle Point,
looking back over cattle grazing below,
looking back beyond the Kaweah’s riparian green
into the San Joaquin, orchard after orchard blurred
into busy, hazy towns as April closed the gate
behind her to climb the slope into the saddle
to look down into the lake, into Greasy Creek
turned Cove since the 60s, houseboats lashed
together into a raft of recovering partiers.
Across the canyon
on the switchback of the old CCC road, she
imagined men with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows,
mule drawn Fresno scrapers, and below, thin
evidence of the steep and overgrown homesteaders’
wagon track above Spoon Rock, narrow as a cowtrail
with some deer, does, caught out in the open, frozen
as April stopped to watch. Black dots of cows and calves
on the far ridge, and up ahead in the rock bluffs,
a coyote paused and disappeared into the granite’s blue
lupine before the fifth gate, heavy lifting off its rest, but
swinging easily into the Lower Field. April was home,
spooking a bobcat, then quail hurrying up the road.
The grass was tall and the world she left was gone.
for Earl McKee
drycrikjournal 