Category Archives: Photographs

                    It begins with your family
                    but soon it comes around to your soul.
                         – Leonard Cohen (“Sisters of Mercy”)

Bring on the sad songs hidden in my belfry,
free muffled desperation’s uncommon tone
to play beneath the trumpet’s discordant blasts

that lack melody or empathy for humanity.
Pilgrim in time, I crave moments with a moan—
minutes to reflect upon what my mind asks.

I need no enemy nor bugle’s call for reveille
to measure muscle, heart or brittle bone—
just a sad song to hum to the ordinary tasks.

Like motley soldiers, we lived the dust,
the harvest heat, grape lugs swamped
and in the barn before the storm—gray

curtains looming in the west bringing steam,
mildew, rot and decay to a crop of grapes.
Right after the war, we were born to be bent

to discipline, small army of many hands
like locusts up and down the vine rows,
dollar an hour, until we stripped them clean.

We knew no better, I suspect, of town life,
all the trouble we could find to try,
become forever changed if not careful.

Could we go back having tasted luxuries
of dreams we never had, could we endure
what we have learned about ourselves

since? Clinging to our lungs and flesh,
we will always breathe heroic days
closer to the innocence of dirt.

We may be the gods
in a cow’s short life
of few interruptions:

water, shade to grazing
day after day, calf after calf—
we appear when needed

most with hay, a taste
to insure devotion. Horn
in her head, she remembers

the relief, the chute, the saw,
that assuaged the pain.
She prays for our arrival.

I know what it cost, the price in time
it took to learn to pack a mule—
diamond or box hitch, how I envied

the tight cover of canvas matties tucked
beneath low loads on a string of sleek,
quick-stepping animals headed up

switchbacks cut in granite scree,
passes to lakeside meadows,
rainbow trout and starlit nights

as rusty bucket smears leaking
light from another, outside world
that envelops us all. Remember when

we lay naked chasing shade around
the puzzled trunk of a sugar pine,
our Roaring River honeymoon

where the was no phone or clock?
I know what it cost in time
to have everything we needed.

The untamed, the cultured and civilized
gone wild, hungry for power, rise
out of the cornfields and the canyons

of big city streets, from behind camo
curtains to poach another prize beyond
the reach of more common men and

women if they can—stars on their own sets
that upset the rest of us. That we envy wealth
and freedom, independence—the quick buck

gained by deceit as standard practice
for capitalists and politicians. Take down
the statues of Robert E. Lee, a horseback,

we have models of our own to cast
and enshrine in every city square
for our poor youth to look up to.