Category Archives: Poems 2012

                         At least I know where my orange trees are.
                                   – Todd Dofflemyer

Cold in shade, in canyons,
or on the backside of mountains
where strays won’t stay between

sunlit ridges—like finding horses
at Five Lakes, in the Tamaracks,
standing in the first light of day.

How many pairs of boots
did I wear out tracking pack stock,
hearing the bell in my mind?

But always that moment alone,
empty-handed, searching,
sorting sign for the illusive truth

when we become boys again,
helpless and humbled
by circumstance and time.

Spreadsheets don’t fit
uneven ground that swallows
livestock—that seldom match

what’s in the corral. This is
no business for accountants
when the numbers move

to breach columns and fences,
or get inspired by the moment
to try an idea of their own.

It happens gradually with time, the red bark peels
like paint, brittle limbs forget berries and leaves
when the roots grow weary of holding it all together.

I’ve been here before, to this Manzanita skeleton
well off the track, half on its side. I see the cut
and know the saw I used on a huge, uprooted other

half-a-stump, limbs all gone. The wind blows cold
and wants to rain miles from home as I start my Stihl,
bales of hay to thin cows fed. One young calf,

a perfect black Hereford cross with featherneck,
bald face, thick white belly and brisket, charges
to investigate, bucks and runs in circles, disrupts us all

to stop sprattle-legged—his curly head low before me,
challenging and bawls. I laugh and talk as if he were
a kid on the street and he relaxes to his mother

and the others that must endure his bully shenanigans.
It happens gradually with time, we grow efficient,
make plans, save steps, haul hay up and cordwood

down the mountain. These limbs I don’t remember
standing haven’t been dead long, bark the color of
coagulated blood—red heart dust from a grand tree.

                                        Then he’s no longer is an observer. He isn’t right,
                                        or wrong. He just wins or loses.
                                             – William Stafford (“My Father: October 1942”)

Like finding our glasses, FINALLY—we expect surety
to be handy, all of our basic certainties camped
on the nightstand, awaiting dawn like good soldiers.

My father pounded his need to be right into the table—
dishes, salt and pepper leaping to his command.
My brother and I studied well as my sister cried and

we all made excuses about the war and government,
except for mother, she never forgot or forgave him
long. I called it passion, but nothing stays the same,

time unravels even the best-knit tapestry, loose threads
in a breeze or bird’s nest, we’re tied to something
in the end. To follow the thread, I need good habits

to augment short-term memory, to balance necessities
like cigarettes and colored lighters that clutter landscapes,
ashes like town dog leavings on short-cropped lawns,

before I leave the house to face the world of men—
to construct a more common sense from the wild
metaphors and similes, just waiting outside the door.

The pundits seemed less dramatic,
red wine in hand, asleep before
the results were in. A man hopes

for the best, that the heifers we gather
and process this morning, act
like good children, try to get along—

that we heed what Xiangmei suggested
in Elko, this country needs a lot of healing.
‘Seed Queen’ on the other side of the Sierras,

she has a green thumb, nurtures growth.
I look to the sky for patience, for thin clouds
thickening into rain enough to start the seed.

Our polling place is nine miles away
on the other side of the second-closest town
and I offer my absentee ballot to Robbin

to vote, to double her voice among the two
hundred and thirty million in the U.S., or
the eighteen million registered in California—

half of which won’t vote. We’re inland,
the rural West, a shrinking minority. But
she still believes, reads and studies

the propositions, has an opinion I respect.
I’ll be glad when it’s over, perhaps forget
that this country doesn’t want to work

together anymore, when each of the elected vie
for an invite to every shindig on Easy Street
where it pays to do nothing. What an ego-trip

it must be to have arrived, play the angles
to pay all the contributors back twofold
the old way. Our polling place, nine miles away,

Sacramento two hundred and fifty, and no one
in Washington knows Lemon Cove exists—
our distance much greater than time and space.

Progress doesn’t bog you down, weigh
heavily and clutter the landscape, rather it
cleans as it goes into endless time and open

space to balance silence with the sweet
promise of convenience, making room
to plan ahead, options other than gridlock.

We cleaned the shed of useless history
saved just in case, like old farmers do—found
that photographs of young innocence fade

just like we do, relieved to let them go.
Twenty years we’ve done without
three dumpsters full, another ecosystem

for mud-dobbers and black widows,
rats and feral cats beneath a leaky roof.
Next the shed goes, before starting over.