Author Archives: John

1.

They come to recognize me now,
weaned calves around the feeder
as I unfold bales of leafy alfalfa,

watching busy hands and the attitude
of my hat, slowly lifting downcast
eyes to ask, ‘How’re we doing?’

Startling at first, this all-inclusive
‘we’—the clouds of grasshoppers,
swarms of bugs, the late spring rains.

                                        ~

2.

                    I slip off in 100-degree heat
                    with a Kubota-load
                    to change my water
                    on the pasture
                    because we can’t
                    do it all when it’s cool.

                    Gray Whiskers.
                    Old Scaly Face,
                    layer after layer
                    of new peels away

                                        in that zone
                                        near delirium

                    where we ignore the sun,
                    they like statues crowded
                    ‘round Old Shirttail Out—

                                        gravity, always
                                        gravity pushing
                                        my pants down,
                                        pulling at my flesh,
                                        wanting it back.

                                        ~

3.

If they were people,
I’d tidy-up,
unbuckle and unbutton,
start over again,
but this is how they see me:

                                                            something

consistent and congruent
they can trust
since losing mamas
they have forgotten
in this brave new world.

                                                             Suddenly they turn.
                    I stop. They come back toward me,
                    my window open to the glorious smell of horses.
                    I’m asking the gods to see them home.
                                        – Jim Harrison (“Night Creatures”)

Busy—Lord knows the gods stay busy in the wild,
or on the edge of it down country roads, day or night,
saving a snake or feeding a squirrel to black buzzards.

They tend to favor believers and seldom look
for converts with hands already full, and some
will work against you when you lose your compassion.

Sometime last night waiting for cars to pass,
a Barn Owl left his fencepost too late for an illuminated
mouse, swooped too low, too close to the lights

headed down the road. It’s a game, you know,
taking advantage of humans, and the gods love it—
love leaving little lessons like owl feathers.

In the dark, the raccoons have taken a page
from the coyote’s book: one to lead the dog off
to bark farther in the distance, while the rest

dine in the fruit trees. The news from Wall Street
is not unique when it interrupts our sweet dreams
of an apricot pie—just before we go back to sleep.

                                    I have been over the water
                                    and lived there all alone.
                                            – William Stafford (“Looking Across the River”)

Perhaps it was Ike Clark, decades
after he stepped off the train
in Exeter from Tennessee,

barefoot in bibs looking for work—
or the shack he shared with goats
and chickens, roosters crowing

in the citrus grove he earned.
I never saw a woman, though
he had grandkids that sometimes

waited with us at the stop sign
for the school bus, where he’d pass
early on his way home, alone

in his green, ‘52 Chevy heaped
with vegetables from the alley
behind the red brick Safeway

to feed his menagerie, horse, pigs
and a milk cow in makeshift pens
you could barely see from the road.

Millionaire hermit, he may as well
lived across the river, his flock
of guinea sentries scratching

beneath his orange trees,
the hollow and empty sounds
of peacocks crying at dawn.

                                             The world we all came from reaches out; its trees
                                             embrace; its rocks come down ready to cover
                                             us again. Moss clings to the feet and climbs
                                             carefully, protecting its own. It wants us back.
                                                                – William Stafford (“Over the Mountains”)

A moment’s escape, I scaled the fence, left the sand box
to the feral cats for the voices of men in the vineyard,
toward the purring of the 8N Ford pulling a wagonload
of grape stakes, toward the loud camaraderie of unshaven
Okies in faded bibs—‘Can’t Bust Em’ before I could read.

Cross arms and wire, box of staples and galvanized braces,
hatchets, hammers and cast iron mallets, tools and men edging
down each dormant vine row, drawing me, one gray December
day to leave my comfort and reach for some unique conceit,
ever-reminded of cat-killing curiosity, I stepped lightly

after the wagon wheel turned over one of my U.S. Keds,
soft cultivated loam beneath them both. It doesn’t matter
now that I swore I’d never tell my father, or what drew me
away from the fields under the guise of education, or how
my parents tried to raise me like a crop, worth something,

or why I returned to the ground that reached out to hold me,
to pull me safely within its vital truth and maze of intricacies.
That world I came from owns me now, keeps me busy believing
in more than man has built for God or profit, for speed
or convenience, just to become obsolete—it wants us back.

Waist-deep in blond
and empty-headed wild oats,
black cows shine,

fat calves buck and run
like young fullbacks
against the grain

off the mountain
in a dusty cloud
to the corrals

to be weaned
and shipped—prices:
blue sky high.

In 1978, my father
sold his cows, claiming
that a man gets a year

like this only once
in a lifetime—
and he’d had two.

Old men talking:
cigarettes and coffee
well before day breaks
over the Western Divide
to blind us all, before
that flaming fireball
spills off the mountains.

No one wants to hear
about those old days
in the saddle when time
was cheap—plodding
with us like a shadow,
working for a dime raise
like it was worth a dollar.

All the bundled string
and brown paper saved
in drawers for another
wrapping, tomato seeds
drying on newsprint—
everyday was routine
with few accolades.

We take license
as survivors now
driving stakes in the ground:
like crank to cell phones
when there were no secrets
on a party line: we listened
for two longs and a short.

Laughable,
what we valued then
and now, how the wind
has changed direction—
how our future spins
just out of reach
and we still chase it.