Category Archives: Poems 2012

It is a study for the shrinks and anthropologists,
a someday segment for future scrutiny, corrals
along the road,

                                tight-clad and helmeted
                                bicyclists in the mist, sailing
                                past black cows sorted
                                from bawling calves, breath
                                clouds rising, steaming

in the unforecast wet before we brand, before
the steady rain that did not deter, did not dissuade
the throw-back purpose for the day.

Winter wet hair glistening between cockleburs
gleaned along creek banks overnight
from last year’s rains, tall battalions of dry stalks
waiting for milk-fat calves to carry on, to carry seed
into the future, but for the bare squares sheered
from each right hip, the clippers’ whine that begs
a gas-driven generator to cough and purr from idle,
time and again, to override our quips and conversation.

                                No slices of silence, vibrating
                                in a pickup bed, lashed
                                and wanting to escape—
                                stiff orange cord dodging
                                tangles with legs, steel shod
                                hooves in slick clay.

Kinked and gritty nylon twine wears rawhide
and leather burners slow to slide, or refuse
to build into a loop—my fingers raw and red,
too numb to tell coils from reins—my lariat
eats deeply into a cotton-wrapped horn
when I catch and bring a calf to the fire.
I stare off once again, another branding
in Homer’s Cove, grinning now into the rain.

Working together on the ground, wet hair
plastered to your smile, we grin and look
like children, but for the gray and canyons cut
by time and sun, running rivulets as we bow
to each calf, little river waterfalls off my brim—
a cadenced mantra of needle injections, tag,
earmark and brand—gobbed white fat spilling
from bull calves. Before the last one
slides to the fire, before we need cleats
for traction, before the muddy group photo
that includes the horseback family

                                that connects us to the magic
                                of New York’s ticker-tape parade
                                for the 2012 Super Bowl champs—

                                but especially the placard
                                that loves Bear’s tight end.

                                                                  for the Pascoes

Brought home a little cold
lingering in fits of coughing, remembering
the moment pneumonia set in
outside the Star 2009, inhaling
a cigarette and twenty below,
or smoking in the alley between
the Stray Dog and the Pioneer bar:
Mike Beck & the Bohemian Saints
pounding sound, like hammer to anvil—
old kids removed from the flagellating
and flailing crowd, flesh pressed
to howling, rocking blocks around.

Who’s hand, who’s hug, who’s heart
allowed the germ to spring like grass
thick after a warm rain? All the kind souls
come for comforting. All the lost ghosts
of the missing that haunt the Stockman’s,
its timbers now begging for another fire.

Unless you are a young poet,
one doesn’t go to Elko in January
on a whim—the cold middle-of-nowhere
makes its sort of the weak-hearted,
of the cowboy dilettantes and devos,
because everyone leaves
with a little something,
like it or not.

When you see dotted hillsides greening,
imagine puddles lining crumbling asphalt
on the road along the creek, bare limbs
rooted in the bank clinging to gray skies—

when you hear their call from the high desert
sea of sage, through pastel grasses
and red willow pools, streams framed white
beneath purple islands dusted snow,

from over the granite Sierra Nevada wall
seven hundred highway miles from home—
a man should know where he belongs
and learn to not overstay his welcome.

There’s a lot going on out there
you can’t video or photograph,
capture in a picture.

I can’t help it now.
Worse than Bukowski
writing every detail

of the ricochets
off the pocked walls
of his skull.

Non-sense. We
have lost our feelings
in the dark, in the light—

grown too comfortable to care
to understand: where and how
to keep it streaming by

like magic snowmelt.
There’s a lot going on out there
and it ain’t by accident.

I surprise myself with where my faith lies,
hiding in the underbrush, bugs and smaller
things busy making lives but only slightly

better, bees in a hive, ants undermining
damn-near everything for shelter and storage,
food supplies. I am a believer in small things

to deliver paradoxes wrapped in irony, regularly—
it’s how life works: when the little man, or
woman, if you insist, leans to the starboard

with the rest against the captain, too light to port.
Stafford’s heron, reeds into the mud, exalts
in Spirit, has no shame nor need for explanation.

They do not fear death, cannot conceive of not
living, not adapting—our curse to seek some
everlasting life somewhere better,

someplace free of sin and worry, hate
and jealousy we couldn’t shake in this life.
I have faith in much smaller things.

                    …feet that go down in the mud where the truth is.
                              – William Stafford (“Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron”)

If I learned nothing else from energetic Dr. Raymond Alf,
it was ‘pond wootah’, where microscopic cells of life form
from hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon molecules

to attach and reattach in the stagnation, out of the mud
we crawled. He saw God in the bottom of the Grand Canyon
as a single cell, a fossilized drop in a hardened sea of mud.

We will go back to the that place and become unraveled
with the detritus of all our discarded poems, with all the love
that never materialized, mixed with the anger and hate

we may not have overcome, to start over years from now,
and so on. But what about the whole-soul of us
looking for a place to light, a familiar branch to rest and wait

for someone listening? Hawk or bear or bobcat even,
we become this place each time we leave, but always eager
to return, to reconnect with the spirit of this mud.

The real news comes to us without asking:

                    down the creek, an upstream rain
                    or cap of snow on cabs of cars
                    late to work, or moon dog rings
                    in puddled stars, or sirens come
                    and coyotes howl before
                    Valero’s tow truck—ever busy
                    on the narrow weekend road uphill.

Trailered 4 x 4s and crumpled wrecks
come down mountains of muddy fun
or quick retreats up with their God,
or both:

                    where clean air and pines
                    collide with jobs
                    for the damage to repair.

We know the road and the time it takes,
offer details to one another, write the story
as they limp by to share next morning,
collaborating like we’ve always done

                    along a road
                    of neighbors
                    passing.

Winter hills, new grass gone brown between
short fuzz of last year’s feed hasn’t changed

day after a two-inch rain, but we believe we see
a tinge of green, ridge tops cattle-dotted,

holding moisture as our minds search knowing
what the color of these hills, will and ought to be—

like cows and calves leaving bottoms in the storm,
forgetting hay, ground turned soft between their toes—

climbing to where grass comes first, all believing
they can taste the green that comes from a night rain.

                               And much I grieved to think how power and will
                    In opposition rule our mortal day –

                               And why God made irreconcilable
                    Good and the means of good…
                                        – Percy Bysshe Shelley (“The Triumph of Life”)

Damn-little new under the sun, our shadows stretch and shrink against
an ever-changing light. I remember the power I had as a boy, the cat
I couldn’t quite get killed and then remove from its misery, high in a tree.
A lesson not quite buried, now after sixty years. But they’ll have it all,

debating state-to-state, trading insults I hope the world is not watching,
in case one of them is elected, representing us, fresh from these playground
antics of one-upmanship like when high-school boys playing grab ass
to the mini-skirted girls in the bleachers—all trying to be cute and cool.

I hear no philosophy, no consistent thought, no high ideals, no change
in the stagnating economic status quo of amended statistics we’ve grown
deaf to. No flag, no bumper stickers on my hay rig—perhaps I am too old
to get excited, find a cause not fraught with non-sense, but good

is not bestowed like candy to children, not a blanket to wrap our fears
within, nothing permanent we can’t improve—instead it grows
miraculously right out of the dirt, upwards with water, roots down deep.
You can nurture it, tend and grow with it everyday, or just eat the fruit.

January 27, 2012

                    I watched with envy as my brother swung wired hay from
the business end of the baler by the hook, stacked bales neat and swift on the
                                                                                                                                            trailer,
pure symmetry, muscle, motion, my summers spent inside a book. Where
does it all go, all that ability, buried desire, unused metaphor, the collective art
that elevates us from all creation?
                                  – Twyla Hansen (“Leap of Faith”)

Apart from piercing space with tiny needles packed with blinking
sensors and paneled instruments, one might hope that same gravity
that ties us here, that holds billions of bugs beneath the tread of thin air,

would keep it all around us—there’s no escape even for our aging flesh
that pauses now to trace a twisting limb in search of grace, a home
to store our yearnings. I can’t remember if she followed me,

towel tied around my neck, off the barn roof into plowed ground,
both believing that if we believed, we could fly. Those grand conspiracies
as children. What evil germ crawled inside my ear, suggested

I cut my sister’s hair smeared with paint and Vaseline before the mirror
where mother harrowed it, pulled forehead and all into a tight and shiny
pony’s tail? That same day I smashed empty Coke bottles on the doorstep,

pulled-up Granddad’s fresh tomato plants—even now, events fade,
sorted-off to single moments to be dematerialized, subatomic dust
into the atmosphere. We must be careful what we breathe and trust

that there is more good than we can see floating out there—raw
material to be received and recreated—so when humanity pauses
to inhale the dawn each morning, it can take a long deep breath.

___________________________________

Twyla Hansen & Linda Hasselstrom have conspired together in a wonderful new book of poetry: Dirt Songs: A Plains Duet from the The Backwaters Press. Review