Correcting yesterday’s post, Sawtooth Peak: far right, Castle Rocks: middle, Case Mountain: almost bare.
It’s a shame that we can no longer click to enlarge the photos. When I get time, I’ll investigate as to whether this a WordPress or Coraline theme issue.
Posted in Photographs
Looking over Dry Creek and Kaweah River watersheds to the Kaweah and Sawtooth Peaks on my way down from the Paregien Ranch with a Kubota load of oak after gathering cows and calves to brand on Tuesday. Beautiful Sunday, but accumulated snow is light. Talk of the long-awaited El Niño influence is sounding surer from local weathermen as they predict rain for Thursday-Friday and Sunday-Monday.
We have lots of choices to begin our branding season, but opted for the climb up the hill to the Paregien Ranch in case we get a series of rains that might make our road impassable. Here we go!
Alive, up-canyon ridges grip like fingers
into the creek bed, pulling from either side,
tearing flesh in a flowing furrow slowing
near the river, spreading fines in the flats
mixed and gathered from granite peaks
where natives search for signs of rain—
for hope, for the ultimate escape
to sit and talk with all gone on before,
to watch the earth unfold—to perhaps
even walk with gods. No allure
of alabaster shine or golden thrones
beyond the clouds compels the wild
heart or the keen eye, satisfied
with working for a woodstove
or making shade to shed a rain.
They kinda put themselves out.
– Art Tarbell
All the barbed wire,
tight fences, gates
and management plans
sag under the weight
of errant bulls.
It’s in the air
come December:
canyon bellows
dusk and dawn.
Latest genetic
work assignments
on paper only.
~
Any notion we may have had about putting our bulls out two weeks later is coming undone, under pressure of habit. A building crescendo of primal bellows in the canyon for the past three weeks has grown from chuckles to fixing fence and relocating errant bulls. Rather than fight nature and fix fence we’ve acquiesced to putting some bulls out now with the cows.
Two weeks ago one of our young bulls found the neighbor’s virgin heifers waiting for a Wagyu bull arriving mid-December. Rather then fix fence twice, we put him with some cows across the road. Monday, one of our older bulls crawled through two fences to find some cows and calves. We removed him and the temptation for the other bulls to another pasture. He then found our virgin heifers waiting for a Wagyu bull, mid-December.
Far from heifers, we put four older bulls out yesterday, four more today. What’s a couple of weeks, anyway?
Between Jeffers’ jagged edge
and Snyder’s Sierra peaks,
we graze grassy folds of clay
on cold fractured granite pushed
through titled sheets of shale.
Dealt deep canyons, ridges lined
like sunlit face cards: hearts
and diamonds glint with winter
dawn. We gamble lifetimes,
season after season with the goddess—
a diaphanous myth embodied
in the least encompassing the greatest—
more humane than the currency
of unreasonable religions,
or governments—she comes and goes
as she pleases, teases us like children
and we obey. No other mother
more erotic in a storm
pushing rafts of limbs and leaves
down a creek rising—our faces
streaked with tears of rain.
Cold canyon bottoms
watch early-rising cows graze
the warmth of first light.
Weekly Photo Challenge(2): “Transition”
Posted in Haiku 2015, Photographs
Tagged dawn, first light, frost, weekly-photo-challenge
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
– Wallace Stevens (“The Snow Man”)
Always the backdrop
of deep pipe songs
awakening at dawn—
Roadrunners in rockpiles
like coyotes at night
finding one another.
Or the late November chill
of sequestered bulls
pacing the barbed wire,
their primal trumpeting
echoes up and down canyon
searching for the company
of work, sweet work.
The quiet moments
in between are cold
before and after
a good hard rain
when fog rolls in,
up canyon,
spilling over ridges
to wall the world away
in opaque gray
swallowing sound
to leave you lost,
disconnected, alone
with only the thought
of becoming nothing.
Waning morning moon
falls into the leafy arms
of a live Live Oak.
Weekly Photo Challenge(1): “Transition”
Acorn to oak tree
shade for girls to gossip by
grinding a living.
With much to be thankful for, not the least of which is ample rain to get the grass started, Robbin and I wish everyone a good-sized portion of our gratefulness.
drycrikjournal 