Author Archives: John

In January dirt,
a rattlesnake awake
warming in the road.

No grass, hawks wait on rocks,
falcons on cow chips,
close to the ground squirrels.

Winter haze, Great Blue statues
watch mounds at their feet
across bare landscapes

designed with black lines
following flakes of alfalfa,
no two the same—

while coyotes come
to the house for help—
but we cannot bring the rain.

                              It is certain the world cannot be stopped nor saved.
                                        – Robinson Jeffers (“Going to Horse Flats”)

We may not have met the hermit at Horse Flats,
begging for news, hoping for more, a turn
towards the good, unaware that our senses are

bombarded now with addictive sensations.
He is outside of our tightening vortex, free
of its forces, yet his lonely choice starves

to share years of one prolonged epiphany,
an overlapping and timeless state of self-sufficiency,
his world free from a certain course.

She has her own way
of pruning trees, not the gentle touch
nor the vision of an arborist,

instead she snaps and breaks,
thins the weak wood that will not bear
the weight of fruit, clears the forest

just to start over—she does not care
if we wring our hands, gnash teeth
or bleed before she accepts our flesh

over and over again. Our moment
means nothing to her, she will adjust.
The grass will spring back to life

beneath our step, mountains rise
and valleys fall to waste. Nothing is
as it was—how could it be?

Out there in the dark, they move
between trees, shadowless
to get a count while we sleep—

all the natives, man and beast alike
making livings here before our time—
before we become one of them

to measure progress by. In dreams
they come and go, offer news
from the past, tempt us once more

to stay a course they could not endure.
With no grass to hide their track,
they rise to the surface of this bare dirt.

You can see everywhere they’ve been,
where hard times changed their minds.
We’re naked now, almost abandoned.