Late June, water scarce for cows
heavy with September’s calf
reclining like hippos in the shade
of thin-leafed oaks. On vacation,
gathered to catch a breeze, they
gossip silently, chew their cuds.
They don’t know, don’t worry,
watch us scurry from the distant
well to tank to empty trough—
listen to us talk with tools
as the morning’s entertainment.
Miles from asphalt, we make
our circles on dirt tracks
from pasture to pasture until
the rains might come November.
They learn early
to be a covey,
to stick together
and look out
for one another—
where Bobcat walks
and Hawk waits
on a bare branch,
where water is
before they die.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal
Tagged San Joaquin Valley Quail, water, water trough
Horseback, the girls work
cattle in the dust, sort cows
from calves before hauling
off the hill to the weaning pen:
a quiet dance to a rhythm
I can only see through boards
as cows ask with their eyes
before moving towards the open
space a horse has made
to leave their calves behind.
No loud bravado spurring
pirouettes into dirt clouds.
I turn away and walk
to the pickups and goosenecks—
remove my maleness
from these corrals that hold
a hundred years of urgent
echoes: men making mistakes
to invent new profanities.
Instead, the perfect sense
of girls instructing girls.
My pagan sunrise hangs over the black ridge
reaching for the saddle this side of Sulphur
Peak with blinding light, this native place
where women healed themselves—to endure
this longest day of hundred degree heat.
Each day shorter, we move with confidence
towards October, imagine gusts beneath
dark clouds that bring the storm gods closer
to bless this dry and dusty dirt with rain.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal
Tagged solstice, Sulphur Peak, summer, sunrise
Afterlife outside
the scars on my hands overlap,
a crisscross map of urgencies
and feeble judgment,
of blindly reaching for
admirable manhood at ten,
digging a bullet from a post,
pocket knife folding
to the bone of a left finger.
The hay hook at sixty
sunk into the back of my right
wrapped in blue bandana
until the steers were shipped—
a long white mountain range
that intersects a short ridge
I have forgotten.
Outside white cuffs
they look like clubs—
but they have loved
from the beginning,
yet wear no scars for that.
No ceremony, no celebration
when we arrive, when we allow
the shroud of time to embrace
all fears and then dispel them.
We hang on the edge, hold
each breath until the next
turn of the sun. How could we
have known such peace exists
when we were chasing rabbits
for the sport of it, wasting time?
Ask the old dog in the shade
if he is satisfied with his magnificent
dreams, with his clever editing
now that he knows he’ll never return.
Who would we be without them?
I wake to dreams running
with Japhy Rider glowing old,
each awakening begins
a new act, a new setting,
new and easy conversations,
and we are grinning.
I am small in all this,
absorbing each moment
as it unfolds, and fall
into that fuzzy parallel plane
where souls gather,
the dead and alive—
where scientists and governments
cannot touch the caring core
of humanity, where Wall Street
wanes. I wonder now awake
if he remembers me
from last night’s sleep.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal
Tagged Dharma Bums, DREAMS, Gary Snyder, Humanity, Japhy Rider
Outside, early summer heat stifles
the mind, bakes a hard crust
upon the brain beneath straw lids—
eyes roll and detach within flashes
of white light, falling towards delirium:
I cannot breathe or see connections,
I cannot think, I cannot write.
Small comfort that I am not alone
within this fuzzy circumstance.
Harassed by a squadron kingbirds,
a Great Blue glides and lights
upon the gravel, stands tall
to claim any open space,
grounded for battle. All supposed
sentiments have escaped to shade,
gone north to cooler climes.
Summer in the San Joaquin,
a damn hard time to write.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal
Tagged Great Blue Heron, kingbirds, summer, writing
Like furious gods,
magnificent thunderheads
rising above us.
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