Category Archives: Poems 2011

I say their names before squeezing the trigger,
focus and shoot – looking for someone I don’t know,
never noticed showing lost among the grass stems,

weeds. The old horse has slowed, given-up
that blurred, brush-busting high-lope in the spring,
to note their coming: early or late, dirt they like,

who are their friends and enemies. Someday, they
will tell more, show sign – centuries of blooming
hues, leaving seed – each has something to say.

Black cows fall out of Buckeye shade
with fat calves looking to play – like
visiting the relatives, screen door slamming
after umpteen kids as mama tries
to reinforce discipline, establish
who will investigate us first.

The steep hills leak and pool between
outcrops of granite, cracked and crumbling
speckled bones dressed with lichen
upon the worn and weathered – hidden
snow melt bogs of clay beneath
spring grass contemplating deep tracks.

Slow to show upon the green,
Pretty Faces and scant splotches
of poppies, scattered Blue Dicks,
Fiddleneck and sparse Snowdrops.
Spring has yet to buzz and bloom,
to hum the first hymns of heaven.

There is no yearning, no crying,
no needs among delighted souls,
except for salt, like waiting for
fifty-pound blocks of hard candy
to sculpt with tongues in weeks to come –
there is no distress among the natives.

‘Barefoot kid in overhauls right off the train from Tennessee,’
she told me, ‘come to California looking for work,’ to Exeter
– The Emperor Grape Capital of the World – a long, lifetime
ago of narrow rows and teams of mules skinned for a dollar
a day. Old to me in ‘56, driving slowly his fairly new, green
Chevy pickup full of vegetables, crates of lettuce, melons
and fruit from the alley where the red brick Safeway stood
for prosperity, when he passed by the bus stop in wet, winter fog,
to wave between his place and theirs, between the big house
surrounded by roses on Marinette and his twenty acres of citrus,
alive with roving bands of multi-colored chickens stirring leaves
with the meowing peacocks (less the one on the chimney Granddad
shot and had hell getting out), stray pigs, goat and milk cow
mowing weeds – a free and loose menagerie making a living
in the orange grove growing around his house and poor corrals
where he fed spoils from town. On cold nights with smudge pots
lit like glowing soldiers, their red-feathered hats down every road,
around every orchard in the frosty black, stars twinkling quickly,
roar of wind machines, flat-head Fords with props on towers turning,
stirring the air, Dad and I would visit his lean-to shed, straw bed
along the road, brandy and his two red-bellied sentries posted
to keep him warm, that finally caught fire – bright ellipse over
silhouettes of orange trees – we drug him out alive. It was
the dirty cheesecloth when he skimmed cream every morning
that inspired the new bathtub she ordered and had delivered
to his house and her walk next door, some months later to
investigate why he was not clean. Chickens pecking at
the table, billy goat beyond the open door she found it installed
outside to make moonshine. Saved his money and died a millionaire.

Runt of the litter, long-haired gray tom
that will never make it here, bent tail
riding parallel beside him, you plugged

into whoever’d take him –
now whines high on a log end
beneath the gutter in the rain, alone
disgruntled with the weather.

His family has abandoned him again –
not even the dogs are interested
in a stare down, each meow complains.

There is no mistake that we are here
to work together, to hold the fragile in
abeyance and focus on routines we know –

to care with sure and calloused hands
and sort unspoken grief to unseen pens
to haul home like our own stray cattle

when it’s done. Scattered by distance
apart from the world and its tragic
consequences – its sad ambitions

and addictions – we come to celebrate
and revere our skills with the unpredictable
and rise to persevere as one. Sometimes

the heart, or is it the soul that shudders,
or is it the moon at its perigee that pulls
emotions up like swirling tides around us

that we dare not speak for fear of hearing
our own voice quake? Is it age worn thin?
We work around raw and tender parts,

find new ways to hold our rope and rein
until time heals the hole in each of us –
neighbors for a long time – it is our time.