Still dark, the sound of a little rain is a welcome relief. We planned to brand this morning, but pulled together a last minute crew of the neighbors to brand our last bunch yesterday instead. Always pleased to have Earl McKee’s help, especially in his corrals in Greasy, we’re doubly pleased today. Let ‘er rain!
Greasy Creek, March 5, 2013
Posted in Photographs
As hot as I can stand,
elbows propped on squeaky knees,
morning showers stream my back
to penetrate and loosen the grip
of the great white cloud
claiming my spine
complaining before day begins.
I was not raised the easy way
of spendthrifts in town, learned
the value of a dollar an hour
shoveling the 1942 flathead Ford
dump truck full of loose red clay
to keep us busy between
moving sprinkler pipes
morning and night, all summer
on the 120 acres of green pasture
for weaned calves—we only dreamed
of machinery, of men on backhoes
my father didn’t need to pay
ten bucks when he had us.
All that character dumped
in a hole that needed dirt.
Twenty years my senior,
resting between bunches
of soggy A.I. calves
watching sons and wives,
grandsons and their wives,
reload vaccine guns, stoke
the fire and sharpen knives
as his great-grandkids hang
from the fence outside the pen,
he rises to tell me something funny—
just how happy
he is to be alive.
for Frank Ainley
Posted in Poems 2013
they looked out over the earth,
and the north wind felt like the truth.
-William Stafford (“Our People”)
We ride under the circling killdeer
cry, almost always looking upstream first—
to the north of where we are
and what comes from the sky.
Beneath the current, a rock and cobble
bottom that horses can’t always see—
they feel their way, stub toes
trusting, splashing in the spring.
Where sand meets the gravel,
wounded killdeer dance and cry
emphatically, turn brown feathers out
to drag upon the ground.
We pair them up like cattle
and search for speckled eggs,
always glancing to the north
to feel what’s coming our way.
Posted in Poems 2013
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