Author Archives: John

There are places to save
things, spots out of the way
of traffic, dusty cubby holes

for lost loves and high
school victories, close
calls and sweet innocence

             banked like candy,
             forever preserved
             to stay the same.

One day, we clean house
to find all the old words
are now meaningless,

so hackneyed and trite
we can’t employ them
like we used to—so

we throw them away,
leave them in the Good
Will box and hope

they’ll mean something
to someone, fine
words that don’t fit

what we have seen—
or what we feel
when they are gone.

                    Our moccasins do not mark the ground.
                                – William Stafford (“Returned To Say”)

We look for sign on soft ground,
something fresh from the past,
even the glint of a wing in the weeds

to draw us from the dusty track.
No one remembers their names,
all the old men or their sayings—

but they are here behind the page,
this side of tomorrow’s sunrise.
They have set up camp, bedrolls

around a fire, each one helpless
as they survey landscapes shrink
and change a little everyday.

‘He looks, but he just don’t see,’
Tom Homer’d say of someone paid
to ride and look, set fences right

or watch the cattle slip away—
then lay down wagers with gentler
angels to pass his long reward.

Ground they know, riding ridges,
they can see what they want—
be entertained or disappointed

with humanity. We look for sign,
listen for whispers on native ground
from all the characters before us.

                        Our north-sea English needs no such ornament.
                                  – Robinson Jeffers (“Rhythm and Rhyme”)

Yet even that abruptness has worn into Anglo-chants
hummed like radio jingles, empty slogans thumped
under breath as the blood pumps with daily survival,
a far hawk’s cry from the flint and club we took to bed

under the warm skins of animals that no longer rise
in our dreams—crude totems on sabbatical, released
from teaching ways to get along on earth. The pot
has melted now, reduced to new dialects, Everyman

has a pulpit in space above the crowd, another soapbox
in the wilds of our high-tech Hyde Park, another placard
to pack proclaiming God will pull the plug on us all,
soon—to free and cleanse us from our sinful natures.

Soft, homogenized in waves of rhyme and rhythm,
we follow the piper’s flute, await our promised morphine,
believe the clouds can hold our collected weight—
we have no north-sea English left, we speak in song.

                                The old granite forgets half a year’s filth…
                                                – Robinson Jeffers (“November Surf”)

The sweep of leaves, the track erased,
first winter storm – spring’s discarded
petals, summer’s seed, and September’s

discontent raked into the earth await
Pacific passion from whence we’ve come—
to rely upon—it pumps in arteries.

Even the old veins swell with anticipation,
dry flesh craving streams, runoff flushed
in rivulets, old slate clean again—the only

promise that may bear fruit despite the lies
of men. Her scent upon wind gusts,
we prepare and pray for rare extremes—

all the damp furies inhaled, the sweet
smell of storm, and after-rain of molding
green—to renew our vows and begin again.

Behind the gate, the dirt track starts
and disappears, glints again like a fish
surfacing on the hillside, then gone

                going on
                beyond the beginnings
                of canyons,
                                seeps and springs,
                granite cracks
                                leaking Sierra snowmelt
                for a long time—
                                gossip rocks
                                whispering.

Cows fall out of manzanita and chemise
to welcome, even the oak trees dance,
limbs bent and broken, holes for eyes

                watching bobcat,
                watching hawk,
                watching nervous strings
                                of quail
                peck and watch
                                like deer
                bobbing under oaks
                                for acorns—

                each movement weighed
                before the flutter and scatter
                gives them away

                                                again

and again, going on beyond
and before. There is no rule
of thumb here, too much to grasp,
too steep to hold

                for men and machinery—
                                a place safe
                beyond the beginnings
                                of canyons.

Days fall downhill in the west,
yellowing shadows the last sun left
to moon and stars – light melting
into golden flats, pooling in corrals.

In the east, darkness lingers in spots
stretching to the creek as first light
torches hillside trees – dawn
slower to dress before the heat.

Red-tails float between sycamores
and oaks for fuzzy-eyed, early risers
mapping a day’s harvest of seeds
connected to lines of poetry.

In the dust, we stand watching the year roll on
big wheels, pull away slowly at first, leaving
tracks of winter-feeding when there was no rain,

clutch of neighbors branding, our gather, wean
and sort, each diesel leans into a season past—
a caravan, a shiny train down roads that grow

farther away. Confused as children in the chute,
eyes adjusting to a dark door, ears to the
unfamiliar, panicked slip-and-clatter of hooves

on a metal floor, they load to ride standing—
hills of home forever fading within portholes,
when would never choose to leave that way.

Check on the pickup seat, beer in the ice chest,
we slap the last semi-trailer on the ass and toast
them instead, find shade to reweigh a year’s pay.