Author Archives: John

We are absurd casualties of politics,
finding our cartoons more interesting
than real life, actually believing
in causes with mascots, symbols
that trigger plastic magic, pay pal.

We would paint the planet with it
if we could, smother the surface
with capitalism gone wrong
if the whole herd got along
and wanted in the same direction.

We cheer for the underdog
and hope that the outlaw’s escape
from town will be enough to hold him
apart. But there’s no getaway
nowadays, no way to be an island.

Not black and white cowboy songs
from New York City, I preferred
Cousin Herb’s Tradin’ Post

live from Bakersfield: steel guitar
and the nasal whine of harmonizing
men at work in dusty fields

between Saturday night fights
over a girl everyone knew
in every Valley town with a bar—

almost every intersection had one.
Cultivated in between, fertile
dirt for boys wanting to become

something other than a butcher
or baker, something bigger
and better than a job in town.

Still searching dreams,
I keep running into myself
on this same old ground.

A jagged black and blue horizon
divides my mind at dawn—between
the ethereal above and the solid
ground we’re planted on—each

day the line impressed unless
blessed with dark storm clouds
eclipsing the difference, clinging
to peaks and leaking torrents

I vaguely remember as cleansing
all states of being. The hills rise
to a broken edge on this divide
branded in my mind for life.

They awake from dusty bed dreams
hungry and hope this is a feed day,
bawl for green alfalfa flaked across
brown powdered flats to assuage the dry
ache, some with calves at their sides.

But for the moment, they look O.K.
It’s every third day, not every other
where they stand and wait and the weak
are never full—everyday I multiply
and divide in my head: more bales

into pounds per animal averaged per day
to ignore them watching me load the truck
for somewhere else—don’t look too close,
don’t meet their eye. We gnaw square holes
in a stack under roof and roll the dice

betting on some early storms to change
lives, turn bare dirt into an emerald green
blanket grazed by black cows and calves—
that miracle we believe in every year,
that magic that makes all the difference.