Author Archives: John

When the bias is bad,
they crowd and push
like children to play

the upside-down game,
turning it all on its head
to find a silver lining.

Out of the brush
like thin cows
to the hay truck,

they come on the run.
We feed our future
miles from the road

to hear the native echoes,
like old Joe Chinowith’s
who ‘knew a man once,

made lots of money,
tending his own business’,
or so my father said he said.

Out here,
it’s easy to look away
to find them busy

at what they do best—
as if they didn’t know,
hadn’t heard the news.

Some days the cards start
to fall into place, each move
opening-up another, like

sorting cattle from your desk
without help—except cattle
have sense to read your mind,

wait their turn in an order
you might not understand
about yourself, as it becomes

a dance on an invisible plane
only approached with time.
Some days the deck is stacked.

But religious or suspicious,
we begin to believe
in something we cannot see.

Best make friends with it.

                                        for Zach

An all-red heifer kept to breed
as an afterthought that calved
and strayed over the mountain,

run through fences by ATVs,
corralled for three weeks,
udder tight before shrinking—

before the brand inspector called
to pick her up in a muddy flat
between rains. We saw it all:

the errant pair chased
by determined desperation,
to miles of separation

when we loaded her big-eyed
silliness in the gooseneck,
“Where’s her calf?”

No one knows, looking dumb
in the face of the obvious.
We haul her home and hope

she finds the heifer
that looks just like her—
and damned if she doesn’t

come back into her milk.

The two sisters undressing by lantern light
in a tent at Ranger Lake, you belly-crawled
like a brave over pinecones and rock

to the edge of their screen, at fourteen—
then gone from us all by thirty-five.
All the broken hearts that saw it

coming, daring the wild and envious
gods you teased repeatedly. How
could we not love you for it—all

that we were not despite our tender times?
I only half-believed you were not gone,
riding ridgetops, this quarter century—

only half-believed you’d be more alive
than myth within my befuddled mind
looking for help to brand some calves.

                                                     for Craig

Solemn-faced, they helped
run the cable under the pickup
hooked to the red, homemade

tilt-bed trailer I paid
five hundred dollars for
thirty years ago, to winch

the Champion bull I bought
over-budget four days before—
his grain-fed weight,

the weight of all of it,
on the back-end lifting
as leveraged against the front

pushed down by the cable
that groaned, strained
against the grain as we pulled

him into place to haul
and cover with a plastic tarp
to have examined by experts

who couldn’t help him now—
who couldn’t help me call
the man who raised him.

                                   for Loren and Terri

                               …this is what agony wanted,
                               these wildly colored birds to inhabit
                               my mind far from pain.
                               Now they live inside me.
                                                – Jim Harrison (“Oriole”)

Over sixty years here
and I don’t know the names
of my closest neighbors,

and taken their blurring
presence for granted, like
tourists speeding up the road.

I see now why old Harrison
is fond of birds, independence
so often missed as souls

prepare to fly. Yesterday
driving back from my brush
with the outside world,

scattering its frustrations
like litter along the barbwire,
he cut through the cold air

for a quarter mile
beside and a little below me
to pace the pickup. For

those playful moments,
our gray and graceful flight
owned both earth and sky—

a sense the untamed envy
in this, or any other life. How
could I not know his name?

Hundred-degree August, new filaree
now grows flat with weeks of cold, red
and purple patches with morning frost—
old cows and second mothers thin,
resigned to raising babies—not yet
spring. Sixty days last winter dry,

they wonder why they bred back.
It wasn’t love the bulls fought over,
re-stretching fences into kindling
and barb wire traps, no long term
planning or romance—nothing lasting
but for the calf, grazing what others can’t.

It is not perfect in the natural world
evolving with humans looking for a living,
that accomplishment that defines our progress
and growth—a wealth that nurtures itself
while we sleep and dream of other things
much less basic to our survival.

After awhile, these old hills echo
with the sayings that have endured,
poetry proven right that draws the line
between what is and what we wish
to see. Foothill forecast: cold and
beautiful with snow down low tonight.