Author Archives: John

All grins, his hands wave clouds
over the desert of California,
palms flat over the bare Sierras,

smears them white, spreading green
into the Valley. His magic childlike
to promise and deliver weather,

godlike sure and we believe—
hoot and holler in the kitchen, tip
a glass and lift a log to the fire.

Relief in his face, I imagine
the poor bastard has friends again
speaking civilly at home

and through the TV screen—
but as messenger of the gods
it doesn’t pay to act like them.

I grow old with this forgetfulness,
waiting for the goddess
to refresh dry dirt with her caress,

                    her long moist kiss
                    to bring this flesh
                    to flush with green.

On bare ground, lost tools expose
our short history since the gossip rocks—
pestles resting for basic work

like unemployed epiphanies
to grind into a living poem
left in a trail of our dust.

I grow old with faith and hope
grown to my shoulder, whispering
their monotonous sweet nothings

that don’t arouse me—that don’t
fill the bellies of cows
with hay or babies.

I grow old with poems
chiseled in clouds of dust—
first lines everywhere I look.

We watch the weather now, ground
damp, generating life we cannot see,
yet to color cold brown slopes like

crossing frothy mountain streams
to plan each step, eye dot to dot,
timed leaps from rock to mossy rock

to gain the far bank, another perspective,
a new approach to trout. The river
in the sky has changed, exposed

new boulders and cutbanks since
I fished here last, now casting
more to luck than experience.

Heavy oak stumps, my legs lack
a willow’s spring and face the current
on cobbles I can only see with my toes.

One might think a break from the worst
be accompanied by trumpeting, bright
angels swooping low with silver watering

cans sprinkling the land, the dry tongues
of man and beast loosed to taste the miracle,
the thunderous crescendo of hallelujahs

with each strike of lightening—a time
to toss the cork from the communal jug
with jubilance and thanksgiving. But

before the seed swells to break the crust
of its deep dust bed, we beg for more
like children for cake and ice cream.

Too late to awake from this dream
we know as well as grass and water,
one might think we rest instead of feeding,

instead of bleeding, wrestling bales of dry,
fine-stemmed hay to clean-haired cattle
in their Super Bowl Sunday best.

Thick, dark clouds rest upon Dennison
as it snows on Blue Ridge, its thin, white
filigree of canyons traced across the Kaweah

as the load rocks in and out of a rut. We hold
our breath, like always, and imagine being
scattered with alfalfa down a mountain’s side.

No difficult goodbyes this year—
except for the many gone for good
we carry with us while they graze
new ground and make new homes.

Instead we gaze into a screen to reach
what we cannot touch. No warm embrace.
no eye to eye, no songs to take on
seas of sage and purple mountains home.

Seven hundred miles away and spared
the tears your voices bring, echoing
unanswered—no high-tech magic yet
better than the real thing.

The untamed eye dancing
in the fire-lit edge of mankind
cloistered in couched repose, keens

within a hawk’s heart flying,
gliding, riding a breath’s current
half-with and half-against

the invisible forces above us all.
And we can only watch the flight
and wonder, if we’ve a mind to.

Easy to be an activist—
to always have an enemy
in your crosshairs, one eye

closed and the other
inside a tube, magnified
without having to look

at anything else, without
having to question what
could have been seen.

You can cry ‘Wolf’
anytime you want, anytime
something close-enough

pops-up, watch everyone run
for a gun to shoot
your neighbor’s dog.

O’ myopic luxury
to not even see
that you just don’t know.