Author Archives: John

…the barn light interrupts the dark
with hope – cars and sound, dead asleep
for miles, while old children parcel

a carcass in their dreams, each
playing on the edge of their grave
for a chance to win, another roll

on the same thin blanket spread
upon her flesh for generations –
drawing lines while she still breathes,

for yet another surgery. Here, we
hold her hand and pray once more
for the gods we’ve come to know.

Don’t say too much – trust
instead from whence you come
to sing its own song, and listen
closely for what can’t be said

with words, for the timid
peering through the brush –
for the Canyon Wren’s call
falling eerily within us.

You are the native, be
generous, leave something
on the doorstep to keep
guns inside the house.

Don’t say too much – they
have bastardized the words,
weaned them early, turned
them out without a home.

                        …my eye seems to change nearly everything it sees
                        and is also drawn to making something out of nothing,
                        a habit since childhood.
                                                        – Jim Harrison (“Fibber”)

Always her ankle at the head of Live Oak Canyon,
toes reaching Sulphur Peak, long legs stretching south
to Rabbit Flat, to her breasts freckled with Blue Oaks

when the full moon hangs like a pendant beneath them
glowing as she sleeps, rising as she breathes, dark
hair cascading between canyons spilling into the creek.

The women who gathered here, gossiped and ground
what they found, spent nights away from men to heal
themselves – they must have seen her first from here,

alive and breathing, heaving with these hills of flesh –
solstice to solstice, sun kissing the length of her body
trying to awaken the dreams and visions in our sleep.

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.

                                            – for Alie and Jeff