Author Archives: John

She wants to move from Minot
to a city that can hold her
attention, to have it all
within a half-hour’s drive—
and I listen, remember
gliding through L.A. in the 60s.

How we must crave
to be entertained, to feel
the latest and the best art forms
going down the road—
to find quiet neighborhoods
close to the action.

She is young with a baby.
The map unfolds, roads
like spokes, they focus
West away from snow.
There was a time, I guess,
digging postholes in the sun,

miles from town, I longed
to rub against the herd, to stir
the city’s fire. Driving home
the long way, facing headlights
of semis hauling oranges
before the rain, Saturday night

along the ditch we watch
for drunks through Yettem
and Seville—all the excitement
we want escaping Fresno
and Highway 99.
We crave our wood stove.

                                                 for Jamee

Thatched and lashed with horsehair
thread, even well-built nests
have casualties, tip in a storm,

spill family overboard, and we
remain to make repairs – find reason,
where so often there is none.

If we have love, we have no choice
but to fall with them, over and over
into the void – and we do it,

not to savor grief, but to collect
what parts we can, to piece our nest
back-together again.

PRAYER

A prayer saved for those
subject to the senseless,
the unexplained, the never
                    to be resolved pain
                    that will shape them
with every throbbing ache
in this flesh – a prayer pulled
                    from mountaintops
                    surviving storms.

A prayer saved for the living
left to grieve the unexplored
alone to find themselves –
                    yet never more
                    the same.
A prayer saved for tenderness
and strength, for love and faith
                    that will endure
                    in time.

We repost these poems for the community of Newtown, Connecticut. Originally dedicated to Jeff and Alie McKee in December 2010.

The bulls have strayed, left steep terrain
where cows graze ridgetops since the rain,
bellyflopped fences to peruse the heifers

sequestered in the flat. Above the lake
I navigate translucent gray eclipsing hillsides,
calling blindly in the fog, listening

for an answer—almost like praying—trying
to gather cows and calves to hay before
putting one bull back, hoping a herd of his own

will hold him. A good exercise for the Sabbath,
before fixing fences. Everything moves slower
in the fog, I remember, watching the fuzzy

silhouette of a man in December driving a stake
with a sledgehammer, hearing the strike of steel
upon steel at the top of his next arc, when a boy.

A calf answers somewhere above, then unseen hooves
tumble sod nearby. Gradually from out of the ashen
gray, a few pairs materialize, plodding before me.

At two a.m., all the undone bubbles to the surface
from heavy sleep, from unfinished fiction folded
and put away on the closet’s top shelf for future
polishing—at two a.m. my perfect world rubs-up
against all the sharp-edged details of nonfiction.

I’ll be fixing fence by mid-morning, huff up the hill
with posts and barbwire, twice for tools and driver,
hoping a third for more will be unnecessary—but
it’s not the work that wakes us from our dreams,
that nags like a fly for the warmth of our noses

before winter, before gathering, branding
and all the old neighbors bringing what’s left
in their boxes of energy, grinning once again.
We’ll miss a few, we always do, and get them later—
we’re used to that. It’s the real stuff that gets away

that makes good stories. But what bubbles up
to interrupt dreams are the natures you can’t
change, and haven’t learned to live with—yet
must—no matter how many working dreams
you manage to put to paper before dawn.