Category Archives: Photographs

                         And a deer steps out of the woods
                         As if drawn by a magnet.
                                      – James Galvin (“Trespassers”)

The din of machinery, all its whirs and whines
in gear, the wide-range of cacophonous diesel combustion
idles like a chorus awaiting direction,

awaiting shape to trigger bigger things, man things,
like moving earth—the music of accomplishment
flexing beneath a shaggy, dark-brown mane

at four and a half. We are kings for a day
in the Kubota, feeding horses. He wants to know
what the skid-steer’s been doing, as if it were human.

I give him names for wildflowers: show him up-close
a Fiddleneck, Snowdrops, pick Owl’s Clover
and two freckled-faced Monkey Flowers, make scissors

from Filaree spears. Cows and calves come to investigate.
He wants to know how the brands got there. We heat
an iron in a fire we start with paper and split kindling

to cook steaks, burn a quarter-circle C in a sanded,
two-by-six redwood scrap to take home—his namesake.
After it cools, it becomes a tool for moving gravel.

                                                                           for Cutler

It doesn’t take much moisture to make a rainbow
in April, a promising mist to hold the grass
another day, bring flowers. Flawless arch of every color

reaching from the rough, uneven spine of a familiar ridge
fades into gray cumulus like a science fiction passageway
from space attached to the mountain, our nearest horizon.

Perfection of refracted light through raindrop prisms
incised into this imperfect earth like a surgical instrument,
uniting this weatherworn and fractured rock with grass

and trees like moss to heaven, or to some foreign place
beyond my comprehension that intimidates this moment
with a miracle, a blessing and pledge of possibility.

It doesn’t take much moisture to make a rainbow
in April for us to feel special—to refresh our faith
in the vows we made so many years ago.