Category Archives: Photographs

NOT YET SPRING, 2015

 

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Leftover cedar
logs from the house
twenty-five years ago
                                          paid for
frame a loamy mix
of decomposing granite and clay
            with horse manure
            stirred and piled
            fine as sand
            three years fluffed
            with the skid steer
and fill what could be
a feeder along the fence—
a sixty-foot trough
for bare root raspberries
blackberries
border of red onions
come summer
and it not yet spring.

Like finches building nests
we enlarge the garden
in two half-days,
tend to instincts
warm air brings
and flesh demands
like plowing fingers
in fresh-worked dirt.

We lift another glass
and see colored fruit
years from here
                                          paid-for.

 

 

WPC — “Wall”

 

LAYERS OF DIRT

 

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This ground recovers our presence
with leaves and weeds, most all
of our mistakes erode with flowers,
explode with colors leaving seed

as accomplishment sags like ridgelines
of old barns and brittle wire between
broken posts as we sink satisfied
into the soil rich with the work

of hands. Calloused hands, hands
a horseback that track our thoughts
when we were green and learning
to see and think the hard way.

As we breathe, all the chiseled chins
of the rough and gruff retreat
to live as monuments in rock piles
with the honesty of rattlesnakes—

an immortality stirred into the earth
that can’t be purchased, but is always
upon always like the layers of dirt
our future depends, rooted within.

 

PLACE

 

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Close to coffee and cigarette,
I could be anywhere—
my tiny light lost
in night’s black sea.

Come dawn, she takes shape
to locate me beneath her
supine silhouette of ridges
rising, breathing like always.

 

BULLSEYE

 

Sierra Shooting Star (Dodecatheon jeffreyi) – March 3, 2015

Sierra Shooting Star (Dodecatheon jeffreyi) – March 3, 2015

 

Somewhere it’s raining
lavender stars in my dreams
awaiting impact.

 

 

TIME CHANGE

 

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Early yet in an early spring,
growing patches, orange-gold,
claim open slopes like flames,

Fiddleneck between gray skeletons
of Blue Oaks pushing bud,
feathery translucent leaves

where the gods walk ridges,
wave hands to paint,
adding color to hillside green

we’ve not seen tall in years.
Out of dust and naked dirt,
new mosaics, lush with moments,

openings for everything put off
in drouth—real work we absorb,
take our sweet time to recognize.

 

 

WPC(2) — “Orange”

 

Pygmy Poppy Eschscholzia minutiflora

February 24, 2015

February 24, 2015

 

March 3, 2015

March 3, 2015

 

March 3, 2015

March 3, 2015

 

March 3, 2015

March 3, 2015

 

I first spotted these flowers in March 2012, misidentifying them as Hill Sun Cups, then, due to drought conditions, only saw them briefly again in 2014. At two locations across the creek and east of the house about 1/4 mile, they began blooming in late February of 2015.

According to the Calflora map, this is the northernmost sighting west of the Sierras. Not a rare species, if confines itself to Southern California and east of the Sierras. Always nice to find a wildflower established beyond its normal range.

NARANJA

 

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Beginning to end,
tender loins and fruit on fire
finding Nirvana.

 

 

WPC(1) — “Orange”

 

BIRD’S EYE GILIA

 

Gilia Tricolor - March 3, 2015

Gilia Tricolor – March 3, 2015

 

Everyone wants a turn
to be in perfect focus,
too many to count.

 

 

Agoseris

 

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Hard to concentrate
under the camera lens
interrupting work.

 

ON GREEN, ON GRAY

 

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Haven’t wondered about Heaven
since Sunday school’s cold
pearly gates and alabaster walls

seemed drab by comparison,
and the blinding shine of silver
and gold eternities much too bright

even for the pure. Out of dust
and dirt we rise, generations
personified in living colors.

We need not preach poetry
or pray for more than what’s
before us full with awe—

small enough to see through
purple stems of Wild Hyacinth
on green, on gray—I believe.

 

 

WPC(3) — “Reward”