Author Archives: John

As a boy, I lidded grape lugs
field-packed when late,
tough-skinned Emperors

were king, chubby bunches
standing in papered boxes,
swamped and stacked

on narrow trailers
pulled by small 9N Fords
to our refrigerated

storage plant
where the grapes held well
through December

where I learned to drive
a forklift loading
eighteen wheelers

most often at midnight
headed to Eastern buyers—
drivers amped on coffee,

bennies and AM radio.
One so distraught
with the threat of communists

taking over—I consoled by saying:
they’re gonna need someone
who can drive a truck.

A strong wind on the summit at Gorman
lifted the long front end of my ’66 Mustang,
tires lighter on the asphalt
on the Grapevine between L.A. and home.

Behind me boys pretending to be men
circled ‘round kegs of beer, pretty girls flirting
on 28th street, open space and rolling hills
waiting in the dark two hours off

beyond my headlights. The war went on,
crimson blood in living color, mangled
Asian corpses, body counts and bombs
I could not drive away from.

I took chances in those paisley days
when living high was almost ghostly
dressed in another skin to escape
the politics and who I might become.

My folks have been grinning for eighty years
as they exit the church arm and arm
without a clue to the future after the war

where he commanded a battalion
of teen-age southern boys
to become bait for the Bulge

without their knowing.
My father farmed for his father,
raised oranges, grapes, and cattle,

and she three kids: boy scouts,
dance classes, trumpet lessons—
more than she really wanted.

And there they are
as I exit from the shower
still grinning without a clue.

Rising early,
the bright eye diffused
that blinds from the ridge

near the Solstice—
shadows from oak trees
shrink up the slopes

of baked clay and granite
that radiate all night
until first light.

The early birds are busy
feeding young
until too hot to fly.

Wet and warm enough for flies
with the gift of Christmas rains
after a month of fog, slow survivors

cling to the screen door, follow us
inside to die by folded magazine
or the Western Livestock Journal,

perfect tinder saved to start a flame—
perfect weather to lure the green
to rise with black dots of cattle

grazing ridgetops with our eyes.
Inhaling damp, we breathe relief
and sigh how long we wait like flies.

Hot iron on hide,
singe and smoke
I’ll always recognize.

We’ve named mountains,
rivers, canyons and creeks
after the first cowmen here

or a faraway feeling
like Farewell Gap
or Hole in the Ground

that lasts longer
than the grip of commerce
and jumbled signage

where the flats
are cut with streets
and impatient traffic.

It’s human nature
to leave your mark
to not get lost.

Poetry is another kind of branding. -Gary Soto

I count the barks in the dark
before sunrise, dog on the job
as I try to cypher who intrudes

our tranquility—so much like
tragic news in the daylight
hunting humanity and me

after the primal bellowing
of bulls echo the canyon,
or the solo owl in a nearby oak

searching for an answer,
as joyous choruses of coyotes
find one another

before the day’s work
of stalking rodents
or claiming carrion.

Earthbound, they can’t fathom
the news I hear and read,
feel it clutch mind and heart,

the wounded part of me
cut both ways
for being human.