Category Archives: Poems 2012

                         Until he extends his circle of compassion to include
                         all living things, man will not himself find peace.
                                                       – Albert Schweitzer

We shoulder ourselves up amid the purple, red,
blue and golden wildflowers amid cascades of grass
seed arched, hanging heavily, picking our way

around moments, trying to leave no track—
speckled Killdeer eggs in gravel driveways,
we choose who to include within our circles

when they amuse us, when we grow up. And so
it goes ‘til we get old, if we’re lucky, making-up
for youth. But there are certain irritations that enflame

outrage and engulf us, the wars beyond our barb wire
we cannot win with battles, that will not let go.
Like the Yokuts leaving game on the doorsteps

of early settlers, what have we to offer our demons?
For better or worse, the end is the same—but perhaps
more a matter of how we choose to get there.

Slow day for poetry on the page,
late rains and weeds need spraying
to keep the summer fire danger down
and snakes crossing cleared ground
around the house and barn, along
the driveway to barbed wire grazing—

a step at a time, wand in rhythm waving
a fan of chemicals over green, a sparkling
mist in morning light upon what I can’t
hoe by hand. A clump of bright-yellow
monkeyflowers yawning will have to go,
last year’s seed germinating after my first

application, after the first rain in sixty days
to start our season, leaving stunted clumps
of White Stem Filaree, miniature needles
and tiny purple bloom surviving, but not
thriving with the beginnings of Mare’s
Tails, rosettes spread into a thick carpet—

summer weeds, thick four-foot forests
without cows. Habit now, every spring,
prepare for summer and clear the garden—
we lean forward in the harness, sway
in slow motion before more than we can
care for—grin as our scale beam teeters.

Green rising into a white sky—
granite out crops and trees
pushing upwards, like yesterday
beneath clouds clinging after
rain. The earth is clean
and damp. Birds nod, wake
and wonder, waiting to fly.

Nothing else will sell today.
Gods and sermons pale
downstream, murmuring churches
between canals of muddy water,
beside parking lots of cars,
here and there, the steeples
reaching as high as they can.

The coyote stretches, tastes
the air, pisses and returns
to his warm bed hollowed
in the rocks and waits
for the first scent or sound
of life. Everybody waiting,
trying not to spoil the day.

Breathing heavily in the dark,
long gusts moan against the timbers
of the house, tree limbs dance,

new leaves shiver beyond the porch light,
the near world all but swallowed-up
with this storm come out of the black.

Like the scurry of mice, light fingertips
play upon the roof, caressing metal sheets
with promises and soft talk, and so

it begins: the drawn-out love making
of gleeful showers teasing trees,
growing louder, pouring steadily

into long crescendos—each drop
pressed into streams and rivers,
cascades loosed above as I grin,

safely hidden, beneath the waterfall
at Soda Springs, behind its veil
spilling, roaring downstream:

dancing colors in the light, blurred,
high-pitched voices of child friends,
some wondering where I’ve gone.

Echoes grow louder, the sound
like a landslide roaring closer
and I want to fly—feathers
and wings I can’t have.

No one likes palpating heifers,
the electric air, the clang, clatter
and confusion on the surface
of every eye—a betrayal, cows
ultimately accept, but remember.
For a moment in this life, I can tell—
feel the ones with empty wombs
worn on the outside, on the hide,
each hair like a brittle spring
triggering flight from steel,
wriggling against any invasion.

Hidden behind a veil of tender
leaves, the hawk upon her nest
watches the commotion, allows
the world its intensities, feels
the eggs push against her soft
under-warm, above us all—
an ascension scattered within
greening oaks on little pyres,
their clutch of sticks like thrones.

Some day I shall learn to fly
and feel it all—see the world
from a safer distance, smell its
differences and acquire tastes
beyond logic. I will carry home
every secret I overhear, and leave
them like feathers upon the ground.

After awhile, everything seems
symbolic, our natures entwined
with the wild and unattended,

we wait upon the whims of weather
like devoted children grown wrinkled
squinting at ridgelines, measuring

the leaves of trees against memory.
O’ the love making of crows
atop the skeleton of the Live Oak

that once shaded the native girls,
women come to heal the days
and nights together, escaping men

upon this hollow hill under hooves
of horses still—since I was a boy—
seems the perfect stage for silhouettes

at dusk, lovers not returned since
their last lusty performance
before stacking sticks in limbs

somewhere up the draw, hidden
in the Blue Oaks, feathering
new life beneath a tender green.

Perception blurs beyond communities
and all the near totems
that have drawn us together in time.

Most summer days, the mountains are opaque,
flat and fuzzy from Visalia, from the irrigated
fields they have become, steaming beneath them—

silt and snowmelt settling into verdant orchards
between a grid of decomposing roads. Too much
close-up to notice where our bounties begin,

the Sierras cease to exist—blurred, faded in the haze.
I was one once, a would-be mountain man, a child
chasing fish upstream to the heavy breathing

of the river and me, of the breeze in cedar dreams,
eyes upon the water, in the eddies along the cutbanks
where all the long, dark shadows I wanted, waited.

Across Chagoopa’s desert sands, a long time camps
within the jingling rhythm of a string of mules,
when a boy begins to talk to himself, tries to be

interesting and honest with nothing but reality
decomposing for steep miles around him. Always
the same, up or down the Big Arroyo, he leaves

part of the conversation there. It marks the trail
where tracks are erased and scent posts wane,
only to be revisited and revived, a lifetime away.

                                       There are some canyons
                                       we might use again
                                       sometime.
                                                  – William Stafford (“Indian Caves in the Dry Country”)

The world may try to end, or after the final battle sorts
good and evil, or when the cogs in the Mayan clock
lock, there will be strays that escape the global gather—

names overlooked in the book of life, or just plain missed
by the crew of angels in new outfits on their first trail ride.
It won’t be perfect. If the earth winds down or the sun

goes static, spotless in this universe, some will adapt
to the lack of plenty in an empty world. We will learn
to breathe clean air, find springs tapped into the Tertiary

and survive with another batch of birds and flowers—
little Edens, here and there, in the wasteland—but
we will never be the same again. Imagine all

the fresh colors and species bent to wild attractions,
geared to breed and seed, beckoning like iridescent
kaleidoscopes, pulsing with a lust to succeed.

We will start over. What knowledge we begin with
will become myth, eventually forgotten and unnecessary.
But there are some canyons we might use again sometime.