Author Archives: John

Occasional reflection
of a child’s forgotten face
from grammar school
holds for a moment,
finds a name that sounds
like sweet innocence,
like trust and honesty
as it should be—like it
was in the beginning, before
the reasonable temptations—
the good and bad accidents
we shaped like horseshoes
into luck, believing
in something else.

Outside, I am reminded
of myself: red chested
finches on the rail
singing lust songs,
the clutch and tumble
of eagles from clouds
in a spring blue sky—
of that urgency
that consumed me
to pace the barbed wire.

We were told
that animals had no souls
worth saving, could not
think or reason like humans
to resist the lewd downcanyon
winds that were to stir us
like savages around a fire—
yet they have their place
in the front row
of my box of mirrors.

They hunt together,
leapfrog one another
in a low, slow glide
to stir a squirrel
out of the grass
early every morning.
Perched on fenceposts
they follow me
with their eyes.

If a man had time,
feed a little in the lean
and gain a bird’s brain
he could become one,
like falconers of old—
even send them
like high-tech drones
to scout ahead,
gather cattle.

For tomorrow’s heifers, steers
and bulls: I count bales in the dark,
add them to the flatbed dropped
from the top of the stack—
a vertical, class two-dump
hook over hook ascent, each bite
deep beneath colored hay string,
toeholds loose, inching-up
like a spider to belly over
under rafters coated
with old dust and pigeon shit
in space too tight to stand—
to breathe so far from the ground.

My diamond plate target is dished
between the rectangular tubing
spaced to create shallow lakes
when and if it rains, cross members
too far apart to catch very many
and keep its shape. I need eighteen
to haul and feed, yet envision
two broken and five bales on the ground
before I fall asleep—two trips at least
up and down the barn’s new stack—
inhaling its fresh alfalfa face.

It could have been Saturday
when the pump quit,
cattle standing quizzically,

leaves in the garden limp
or a hundred and ten
in the shade with no breeze

to allow your thoughts to ride,
escape to a snowmelt stream
to sit beside instead.

Running water is a luxury
in the middle of all this dry,
a blond and brittle sea of grass

on clay and granite baked
beneath, radiating heat—
each canyon an oven

even the natives left
in the summertime.
So much for progress,

but when we were younger
we all knew how
to prime a pump.

                                        for JEG