Author Archives: John

I would have flown had I known where
the rainbow ended, slogging knee-deep
down a vineyard row before kindergarten—
I believed everything my father said.

Pulling sound and intension from empty
pages, painting pleasure, an additive curse:
over granite scree to the Kern River canyon,
the roar beyond the beaver ponds reflecting

white clouds on blue islands between sugar
pines quivering from the nose of a rainbow trout
spreads across my flesh, opens a lifetime up
to great escapes that conserved my sanity.

Before the heat, Cooper’s Hawks own
the dawning, three flaps and glide
between sycamores and oaks

for squirrel or quail. Two coyote pups
have become the easy road kill
they were hunting before the snakes

and cottontails had to be peeled
from the chip seal. This old road
flows as a river of meals,

an overnight history
of the wild life at night
I missed while I was dreaming.

Keeping track on scraps of paper,
poet friends and cattle
in far-flung pastures

I’ve yet to see, yet to gather—
yet I can smell them near,
inhale their cud-breath

from letters pressed
in chapbooks: songs
of purpose and suggestion.

Numbers don’t matter
this close to the corrals
and its dust-cloud sort:

‘in and bye’
for one more season
or gooseneck trip to town.

I’m not sure I noticed
the grand old oak on the ridge
when it was alive with so many

green others before the drought.
Crushed today, it wrapped
its brittle branches around me.