It’s not often that you see two different species of hawks in such close proximity to one another, calmly waiting on the edge of a water trough. But this morning while feeding the horses, they let me get close enough to use my ‘point and shoot’. I defer to the birders, but it looks to me like a Red Tail on the left and a Harrier Hawk on the right.
Partners for a long time
on this earth
overlooking
hills and canyons,
wet or dry,
side by side.
Close enough to touch
one another
in a storm,
comfort and embrace
with solid roots
and sturdy limbs.
Monuments
until our grand stay here
finally decomposes.
During hot and dry times
the little birds gather
around the house—
around water
leaks and irrigation—
more dependable
than humans:
woodpeckers clinging
to rainbirds,
bushtits flocking
to timed misters
at six o’clock,
quail rolling to a stop
at the water trough,
and swallows plunging
into the ‘sip and dip’.
But the thirstiest of all,
the nervous Oak Titmouse
at the dog’s dish,
one drop at a time
all day long.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2021
Twenty years of stories,
her Fairlea boys,
each chapter
a partnership,
a melding of flesh
and eye,
muscles rippling
like ocean waves
to action—
to make the cut—
then whisper a nicker
of approval.
Posted in Photographs
Out of the Gulf to rest upon the spine
of the Sierras, run aground on the Kaweahs,
animal shapes spill overboard
after marking months of blazing days
since April showers, we watch clouds
and wonder if it rained on Arizona friends,
or if it’s pouring now on the Kings
or in the Roaring River Canyon, Rowell
Meadow darkened beneath them.
Despite hot monsoon gusts that lift
and twist the dust across the pasture,
pregnant cows sequestered to the shade,
we dare to breathe relief as the sun slides
south—split redwood and Manzanita
waiting ready near the woodstove.
Dust trails behind
plodding black cows off the hills
to water, bellies stretched with calf,
while we drink coffee—
and we are proud of these cows
who grazed uphill to bed
while we drank Tangueray and tonic,
slice of grapefruit instead of lime.
An acquired taste, raising cattle
through years of drought—
a bittersweet love affair
with the ground that sustains us.
We know her every crease
and wrinkle, and which leak water—
all of her magic spots
forever branded in our brains.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2021, Ranch Journal
I still call it “the Swamp”
where thirsty Valley Oaks
centuries-old shed their limbs
among barkless skeletons,
bleached bones like flesh
waiting to fall into the next life.
Half-mile across on Christmas Eve,
1955, the Kaweah flowed to the doors
of our ’53 Buick—headlights
diving into oncoming wakes
like Captain Nemo’s submarine.
Not free to run when it wants,
we have held the river up
in the hills for sixty winters,
only to let it run all at once
across the Valley to irrigate
orchards and summer crops—
no kids fishing from shady banks
a lazy river recharging wells.
We can’t fill the dams we have,
yet cotton trailer billboards suggest
that dams can make more water
without looking to the sky.
(click)
drycrikjournal 