Author Archives: John

Flower Friday: Clarkia unguiculata

Posted on May 1, 2015 | 1 comment

 

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Posted in Photographs, Ranch Journal

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Roadrunners Revisited

Posted on May 1, 2015 | 11 comments

 

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Coming home mid-day yesterday, I counted three, the camera counted four. (Enlarge)

 

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Posted in Photographs

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CLICHÉS

Posted on April 30, 2015 | 4 comments

 

The clichés rained
when I was young
like hollow outlines

I was destined to fill
with real details—
sayings tested with

practice dodging
bullets with agility
and dumb luck

to get old enough
to speak at funerals
of a few good friends

who rode with me,
or saw it all
from a distance:

no straight track
ricocheting minefields
heavily invested

in the senses. But
no longer hackneyed
hints for youth,

they become fresh,
reborn with answers
at our fingertips.

 

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Posted in Poems 2015

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Roadrunner Babies

Posted on April 29, 2015 | 7 comments

 

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We found the Roadrunners’ nest on March 29th and have known the eggs had hatched for a couple of weeks, but the chicks have been too small to photograph until now. In the cactus along the driveway, I caught the pair off the nest this morning.

 

 

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Posted in Ranch Journal

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WPC: THE DANCE

Posted on April 28, 2015 | 3 comments

 

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In the branding pen,
the steady dance of old hands
celebrating spring.

 

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Motion

 

3 Comments

Posted in Haiku 2015, Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal

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GOOD RAIN

Posted on April 27, 2015 | 3 comments

 

Dry grasses, weeds and wildflower leaves
turned brittle, blond and hollow-stemmed,
past help or hoping for a storm as we,

when the sky went gray for days: clouds
stacked, thunder clapped in the backcountry,
spilling little drops erasing tracks in dust

with damp, new air to breathe. Every creature
prayed—out of habit more than necessity,
to all our different gods—a great wanting

on the breeze, just to see it rain. Like true
love at the core of things, it came in sheets
of ecstasy—that full feeling of feeling good.

 

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Posted in Poems 2015, Ranch Journal

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THORNY ORNAMENTS

Posted on April 25, 2015 | Leave a comment

 
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Christmas in April,
Wild Cucumber on a dead
Manzanita tree.

 

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Posted in Haiku 2015, Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal

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Echinopsis Oxygona

Posted on April 24, 2015 | 1 comment

 

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A one-day bloom
as the hills turn brown again
around Mother’s Day.

 

 

Work of Art

 

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Posted in Haiku 2015, Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal

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NEW FRONTIERS

Posted on April 23, 2015 | 7 comments

 

We are farming just beyond
your city’s limits to sustain growth
by building houses, irrigating fields

to feed you. We are drilling deeper
wells all around your sufficient
neighborhood mapped on asphalt.

Either side of the fuzzy border,
we get old, get tired of adapting
to mistakes—unlike bugs, we live

too long to develop genetics
our children’s children will need
in an unimaginable future.

History will say our families farmed
the San Joaquin for 200 years
before running out of water

fifty years from now—our thin dust
upon dry layers of earth stacked above
a depleting Pleistocene sea.

 

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Posted in Poems 2015, Ranch Journal

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RAILROAD TOWNS

Posted on April 22, 2015 | 1 comment

 

A fluttering of other lives
busy nesting out of reach—
dry thatches stashed on beams

under eaves like apartments
with squabbling, feathers floating,
on and on—as we lumber

beneath them, intertwined.
Crows claim the tops
of power poles on 65

through rolling hills of oats,
stacks of sticks close to roadkill—
adapting quickly to our urgencies,

to these forgotten outposts
of railroad towns
growing closer together.

 

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Posted in Poems 2015

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