Monthly Archives: April 2013

1.

Easy-living where troughs and faucets leak,
where Cottontails lounge in the gooseneck’s
dust and shade with ground squirrels and quail—
Roadrunners pause and pass with limp lizards,

nest bound. A smear of downhill color
horses graze and walk around to water,
the only monkeyflowers left in the dry,
short-cropped grass, a beacon of smells

below the bellied tank bleeding tears
from a shank of hanging moss, reaching
for muddied ground—it drips,
as it dripped for years, crying for repairs.

2.

The ground comes alive with the scurry
of baby squirrels, Bobcats streak
and Ravens feast in the distance, even
the house cat forsakes fresh dirt—impacts

from the infrastructure of gophers
under construction, undermining
lawn and garden—for an easier catch.
Pinchers and tails of scorpions piled

in the guano of bats beneath the eaves
where ants pack the leftovers off—our eyes
are peeled for black widows and snakes—
for easy-living where wild congregates.

                                      Too poor to pay,
                                      Too rich to quit.
                                           – Velvet (“Gunsight Ridge”, 1957)

We tread water in a river of time,
run a ranch, raise cows, write
poetry in the gloaming, you and I—
without the weight of currency
to hold us under, hold us apart.

This evening of light draws the wild
from shady burrows and perches
to perform, to exalt the sky, to dance
with winged grace we emulate—
a brush of words to mark our passing.

Cows and calves are soft
and in the shade by eight,
now that the oaks have leaves—

flat ceilings pruned above
their jumbled silhouettes,
black patches easy to miss

across the empty, short-cropped
field of foxtails turned
a perfect biscuit brown

measured with our eyes
against the coming summer
and distant fall before it might

ever rain, be green again.
They worry not—all
the heavy dread is mine.

                                        Easy, but hungry.
                                             – James Galvin (“What Holds Them Apart”)

Perhaps the rodents first
showed us how to store wild grain,
woodpeckers: tools to improve.

Our larders volunteered
and we became farmers,
builders of things.

The hawk has it on easy-glide
parting grass with his eyes—
like a satellite in space, spying.

Or like sea gulls trailing fishing boats,
a flock of blackbirds rising and falling
around a boy breaking clods

behind the tractor and earth turned
in the vineyard—I wondered
how they knew, how they learned

to follow in the wake of progress,
of our proclaimed genius—
it was easy in those days.