Category Archives: Photographs

Evening conversation dwells
on a thin cow, vaccine
protocol and the dog’s limp

without a hint of politics
beyond the barbed wire—
beyond this ground and grass.

We don’t want to know
what makes the news—
what makes the outside world

tick with greed and power.
Evening conversation dwells
on more important things.

It could be heaven
if the girls across the canyon
cared, if they worried

about the time of day
or year when green
turns straw-blond dry.

They are spared
the human condition—
graze until they die.

                                                                                What will you do? She asks. I will
                               continue north, carry the past in my arms, flying into winter.
                                                  – Jack Gilbert (“BRING IN THE GODS”)

Might we say

we leave the past on the page,
chapbooks bundled in our arms
heading north into the storm—

                    time-faded faces,
                    moments tagged
                    into poems.

We know their names
and cherish visions
with vibrant clarity

like a bell chiming
on a wind gusting
across the canyon

of time behind us.
Three score and ten
more, I am reluctant

                    to let go
                    of this life
                    in exchange

for something more
like fulfillment
everlasting.

When Zinfandel heavens part between rains,
we lift a glass of Cabernet at dusk
towards their fleeting magnificence

before the storm, beyond our reach
or responsibility, helpless but to bask
in the fading light of certain truth.

                                        nothing left but a river flowing on the borders of heaven.
                                              – Li Po (“On Yellow-Crane Tower, Farewell to                                                            Meng Hao-jan Who’s Leaving for Yang-chou”)

Branding big calves an hour from the asphalt,
snow-laden Sierras dressed in diaphanous clouds
a stone’s throw across the North Fork canyon

from these corrals too short for modern cows,
we talk about the pressure-treated posts you set
six foot down back when I can’t remember.

Away from the world for years, you are both here
and beyond the Great Western Divide,
a fuzzy white river flowing south to somewhere.

                                                                  for Gary Davis