Author Archives: John

They think, see you carefully and read
your simple poetry as if an open window
to your mind. You must offer honesty,

kindly, find your rhythm on a hillside,
find grace and patience where there is
no hiding your intent so far away

from the corrals. This morning’s page:
steep—Blue Oaks thick on a north slope
slick and rocky where the grass has held

and drawn them, peppered dots of cows
and calves appear and disappear within
a raft of trees where they should be,

despite your sort of wets and drys,
despite the pens and alleys you try
to write around—they are content.

Another game in the backroom, smoke
clouds a swinging lamp, wagers made
‘for’ and ‘against’ the whims of human nature
as dancing girls serve, and serve again

all over town for a dollar. We could be
the carcass on the table, flesh sliced thin,
honed steel a glint, they toil and angle
like bloody butchers trimming the best cuts

for themselves. Outside, pimps and barkers
watch the door, up and down the street,
pretend to be selective, pocket bribes
and whisper, ‘it’s the safest game in town.’

No tea cups here, no cloth napkins,
no silver candelabras holding flame—
the play is fast and furious, full of
promises, ‘you’ll never leave the same.’

Always gambling on the sunlight, on
the rain, the planet spins its own roulette:
hawks glide and rivers murmur to the wild
that’s left without a dime to its name.

Awakened before three, I am relieved
to rejoin my dream gone-on without me.
Tracking the blackness, I feel my way
to where I was, what I can’t seem to be
awake—with all of man’s accomplishments.

                    There is no script, we write as we go—
                    scout ahead and fill-in the details
                    we wish to savor most, but careful
                    not to attract too many bees—private
                    showings we may choose to share

of what we remember. Dark hawk on glide
across the canyon surveys me and my
intrusion to this place hidden where I lay
in the saddle as a boy, waiting for deer
driven-up the steep draw and bare hillside

for a shot. Slick and Clarence on either side,
trigger to the heavy British .303 never-squeezed,
unnecessary. I still can’t find the little buck among
the does so far away bounding. But yes, it was
exciting, as good a place as any to begin again.

                                        Everyone praises a different day
                                        but few know their nature.
                                                            – Hesiod (“Works and Days”)

Today, the world changes—too many people
leaning towards the north star has tipped the planet,
exposing shadow beneath the tree that we believed
would comfort us and always bear fruit.

Yes, we are the centerpiece of that myth,
adding the last bit of gold thread to the fabric
that comes untrue, unraveling and fading
in the relentless, everlasting look of the sun.

Now I can remember, replay the finer details
from a distance, see myself among the mindless,
shoulder-to-shoulder in the crowding alleys
pressed onward towards the mounted silhouettes

in the sunset. But a corral board broke early-on,
around Vietnam. The sky was clearer then,
more obvious and less complicated, not everyone
leaned in the same direction, waiting to be served.

Green grass gray at first light,
the hills don’t know it’s Sunday,
nor care that I am lost within

mottled shadows under trees
with a bumper crop of acorns
waiting for a rain. Time slows,

each second lingers into the next
like early spring and I am changed—
coffee and cigarette staring up canyon,

peaks afire in morning cold
before this threshold facing north,
open to each breath, all urgency gone.

Trite and hackneyed voices come
close to roost as ravens, as plump
quail puttering from rock piles, as

these squatters, a growing band
of racing pigeons testing wings, flare
and glint in unison: no going back.