Where the creek stops in moss-laden pools
miles above the Kaweah in August, wild hens
collect with half-grown poults scratching for seeds
and bugs—aware, but not caring. I whistle
for a gobble as they drift off into the brush
as I have, into the canyons of lichened rock,
the Live Oak and Chamise. I am native
here, apart from where I came to forget
the blunderbuss of duplicity.
I came to be refreshed by the unafraid,
by the innocent and self-reliant—
I came to bring some home with me.
Mind gone blank: Zen empty
across the creek gone dry,
shadows stretching over long blond feed,
first-calf heifers coming out from under
shade to water for an evening’s graze.
It’s all the mind I need.
The news rains off my shoulders.
Even the eclipse didn’t faze me,
but for the fuzziness in my gut.
For a moment, it worried me—
so disconnected to the periphery
I had no need for poetry—
no need for anything but to breathe,
to inhale and cleanse the flesh
as it melts into the gloaming.
Fires in the night flicker on different faces,
candlelit or shadows borne from torches,
glowing herds driven by separate forces:
Black & white
Love & hate
Wood & steel
of celestial guitars—how loathing
corrupts the innocent and trusting,
all the possibilities of anything more.
Robbin, July 2011
The answer in art appeals,
resides within, not without.
It adds, it multiplies
boundlessly: fresh, unnamed
senses like ripples from a pebble
spreading across pools
we harbor in our hearts
apart from politics,
from the legions of agendas
to satisfy the appetites
of power and greed
where might is right.
Art is not correct
and never stays the same,
illusive as the canyon wren’s
cascading song—I hear it now
again for the first time:
bear clover forever stirred
in memory miles away
in time and distance
trout fishing as a boy.
In the churning air we breathe
the latest news cascades from mountaintops,
waterfalls of misty details stream instantly
around us, tugging eddies we ignore
like bad dreams—waking to
and shaking off nightmares of fear
we carry on, we persevere.
How I envy cattle and coyotes
their ignorance, poor dumb beasts
with habits honed day by day,
moon to moon. Greeted by heifers,
nearly yearlings coming into season,
I can feel their flesh crawl with heat
beneath tight black hides that shine—
each day yet a new confusion.
It will suffice to linger among them
reading poetry under my breath
until they bore with my poor intellect.
I know all the old horses
and the men who rode them
to their ridgeline bleachers.
Full moon August rises atop
her perfect breast perfectly
after all these years, centuries,
eons—I am relieved from
the world inside this galaxy,
this tug of war for power,
gravity without compassion.
I lean toward the heavens
and the far ridgetops,
send roots deep
to good water and wait
until my moment is up.
They own the air we breathe.
Jim Harrison (“Old Bird Boy”)
Spring delivered a clan of blackbirds
to the Coastal Redwood thick with dead
limbs too far from home. Quick fighter pilots
patrolled the air and drove away the crows
like coyotes baiting cows from newborn,
from their egg nests—hurried off the hawks,
dived-bombed the dog when fledglings fell
before they left, gave up the lawn to families
of quail, little tikes on wheels from winter’s
prunings piled to dry before burning,
bringing summer coveys from the garden’s
damp cover to explore the rest of their world.
Hummingbirds hover the hibiscus. Black-headed
Phoebe’s wait from the backs of chairs
for flying insects that cloud our breathing.
Our space grows still in the summer baking
as a Cooper’s Hawk claims the air,
walks the rail to bathe beneath a sprinkler.
We wear the struggles here
like scars, deep furrows cut
by joy and pain upon our flesh
rising bravely before dawn.
What tracks we leave will fade
eventually, the dust and rust
of dreams that tried to dance
with gravity and grace.
Birdsong,
crow’s cry,
the titter of quail
awakening,
the coyote’s howl,
screech of an owl—
simple tunes
to put words to.
It is an art, writing songs
beneath our breaths,
all the old mantras
matching the heartbeat
of living things, the wild refrains
that beg release instinctively,
caring not for praise—only
space to turn them loose.
I drove the Kubota with Allie early this morning to change the irrigation water, the first time I’ve been beyond the house since total knee replacement surgery three weeks ago. Good to get out and see our replacement heifers coming to greet us. Knee doing well, walking with and without a cane, a little progress every day.
Not everyone is an observer, and only a few have an unquenchable thirst for the truth, for how things work away from the asphalt. How Amy Auker sees her natural world in this collection of essays reads like poetry, and sounds like poetry as well. I was so delighted, and so subsequently exhausted with these detailed vignettes that I had to take tiny bites at first, 10 -15 pages at a time—not tired exhausted, but I was left so ethereally spent that I needed pause to percolate from my out-of-body state. Her writing engulfed me.
Auker cowboys the Spider Ranch north of Prescott, Arizona, a nearly inaccessible landscape except by foot or horseback. What she sees, what she shares is that rare glimpse of the wild she rides, and how her natural world flows around and within her inquisitive mind. This is a love story—a love for a man and for a place that are one in the same.
Among the strong contemporary women who are writing the West, she represents the cattle culture candidly, and so thoroughly, that one cannot help but scrap all the cowboy stereotypes for an unheralded ethic common to most ranching families shaped by the land they occupy. Ordinary Skin is perhaps the most beautiful and original prose I’ve read in years.
drycrikjournal 