Category Archives: Poems 2011

Awakened before three, I am relieved
to rejoin my dream gone-on without me.
Tracking the blackness, I feel my way
to where I was, what I can’t seem to be
awake—with all of man’s accomplishments.

                    There is no script, we write as we go—
                    scout ahead and fill-in the details
                    we wish to savor most, but careful
                    not to attract too many bees—private
                    showings we may choose to share

of what we remember. Dark hawk on glide
across the canyon surveys me and my
intrusion to this place hidden where I lay
in the saddle as a boy, waiting for deer
driven-up the steep draw and bare hillside

for a shot. Slick and Clarence on either side,
trigger to the heavy British .303 never-squeezed,
unnecessary. I still can’t find the little buck among
the does so far away bounding. But yes, it was
exciting, as good a place as any to begin again.

                                        Everyone praises a different day
                                        but few know their nature.
                                                            – Hesiod (“Works and Days”)

Today, the world changes—too many people
leaning towards the north star has tipped the planet,
exposing shadow beneath the tree that we believed
would comfort us and always bear fruit.

Yes, we are the centerpiece of that myth,
adding the last bit of gold thread to the fabric
that comes untrue, unraveling and fading
in the relentless, everlasting look of the sun.

Now I can remember, replay the finer details
from a distance, see myself among the mindless,
shoulder-to-shoulder in the crowding alleys
pressed onward towards the mounted silhouettes

in the sunset. But a corral board broke early-on,
around Vietnam. The sky was clearer then,
more obvious and less complicated, not everyone
leaned in the same direction, waiting to be served.

Green grass gray at first light,
the hills don’t know it’s Sunday,
nor care that I am lost within

mottled shadows under trees
with a bumper crop of acorns
waiting for a rain. Time slows,

each second lingers into the next
like early spring and I am changed—
coffee and cigarette staring up canyon,

peaks afire in morning cold
before this threshold facing north,
open to each breath, all urgency gone.

Trite and hackneyed voices come
close to roost as ravens, as plump
quail puttering from rock piles, as

these squatters, a growing band
of racing pigeons testing wings, flare
and glint in unison: no going back.

There are times to edit, summarize –
close chapters and move towards
some purpose for the words, rise

with the sun and let syllables float
across the colored pool and through
its rain of leaves—all that I wrote

baked behind me, November, alive
like spring. We are winter people
grazing changes as they arrive

from the endless black and blue
sky. We pause to look up, wish
and pray, find gods to tip glasses to—

we are oaks with acorns at our feet,
long-limbed sycamores dancing naked
in the rain—no time to be discrete.

I will usually choose the worn and threadbare
fumbling in the dark to dress, a favorite shirt
wearing yesterday’s fence repair and branding

blood, due respect for its endurance, as if
it had a soul, the comfort ours given purpose
beyond good looks that the old cows recognize

at a distance—a ceremony, almost like a prayer
before I face the anticipated angle of the sun,
season after season. No one cares, out here—

no one judges prosperity or intelligence
by what we wear. For poetry or life in one place,
just the proper fit of word and deed.

When wild oats were over my head,
we would roll like logs downhill
while they made plans to build a home
looking at Sawtooth and the Kaweahs,
Homer’s Nose and Blue Ridge, up
at the sky and down upon the river.
I had hoped it would be red brick
to keep the wolves at bay.

It has to be hard for them now to see
us sell it, empty its contents, wrestle
with memories that slow us down.

From the last ridgeline, one might
imagine they see it all with perspective,
that giving-up the Sixties is necessary
now that we are old, holding close
to the river’s edge and its eddies
as it rises. Never beyond their reach,
I’m sure they recall that I wanted brick
to keep the wolves at bay.

We will always be suspect
no matter how much hay
we intend to feed, pickup

dripping loose alfalfa once
the strings are cut, always one
nervous on the periphery,

sensing something
from another plane
when our eyes meet.

Was it a forgotten stray
thought she found out
grazing, some unfinished

poem abandoned,
misunderstood, misheard
in the rhyming?

Or did I get close
to speaking her language—
closer than she to ever taste

the first fluffy bites
of joy and satisfaction?
So much like people

who wear their fears
like yellow slickers
always ready for a storm.

if technology
is like a drug
or glass of red craved

when the light is right, if
cell phones should be
sewn under the skin

like pacemakers
for the brain, or is it
a weapon like a gun,

better than a rock or club
to wave up-close,
or is it how we keep

our space intact, yet
safely connected
to an insane world?

Are we truly any closer to
understanding one another—
or ourselves, or the dirt

we are nurtured by
and will return to
when the light is right—

where shadows dance
beyond a ring of stones
and man-made magic?

                                        …we do not deserve to witness this courage.
                                                          – Jim Harrison (“Rachael’s Bulldozer”)

On the dark side, the dog barks—
identifies intruders by syllables clipped
in tempo and tone, awakened to

Opossum:
                    rapid incessant,
                    making little progress
                    like a Skunk
                    without its scent

Coyote:
                    deep, sure and quick
                    breaking-up
                    into the high-notes

Feral Hog:
                    tractor steady
                    onward

Bobcat:
                    quick and distant

Lion:
                    like a coyote
                    without the high-notes

Bear:
                    don’t know

Raccoon:
                    growl and hiss,
                    the battle’s on!

                    fumble naked,
                    light and gun
                    to referee

Mud on his boots, he left
dark remembrances, tiny clods
across her worn, oriental rug

to a pile beneath the chair,
discussing business, bib
overalls agape to flesh,

feet begging to get back
in the field. I see Louie’s
been here, she’d say arriving

from a pot of soup put on to boil.
A child underfoot, I’d look up
questioning and follow her eyes—

yet never wondered why
he did not stay for the noon meal.
The old house creaked all night,

leaking bits of conversations,
a scattered trail of syllables
that begin to sound familiar.

Some men should be left alone
to nurture dirt and feed us
for neither pay nor charge.