Category Archives: Poems 2012

With a little luck, we become
a third person consumed with
plugging holes with acorns—

all sizes, an art perfected
in the fall, each picked ripe
from the tree. Of course,

there’s bickering for the prize,
flapping feathers in the oak—
but come the winter’s wet and cold,

who’s to say who filled the hole
in the post that holds the gate,
that keeps the barn upright?

                    I arrived by air, by the light
                    of a million stars.
                                        – Quinton Duval (“The Aviator”)

Outside the day begins with dependable shoes,
a mental checklist wider now with lower heel
to meet uneven ground—each day another chance

to see a world surviving with damn few
humans in it. Perhaps a reverie at work, yet
unfurling, with so many eyes to see through.

‘Make it rich,’ Hal Spear said, early-on, each
moment open and elastic to fill the emptiness,
to jettison useless cargo. It works like a dream.

Our slice of earth, cobalt blue
beneath a dawning, loose clouds
pink as my mother’s nightgown.

Quiet in the canyon, calves
impressed in beds against
thin maternal dreams of hay.

It will not rain soon, but
it’s beautiful and cool
before we stir our dust—

hooves and wheels, a boiling
shroud for blatant bawling
deep within the turmoil,

big-eyed and insistent,
they plead not guilty.
Who is responsible

for feeding the world
what it needs, who cannot
go back to sleep?

The camera crews are ready.
Judge Judy has arrived.
All the cows are in their pews.

Certain rocks draw the eye
and speak a single word
we never learned—too far
removed from survival,
too addicted to science
searching to soothe us,
to accept as truth—
we have convenient homes
furnished in our minds.

Not far, a young boy sweats
behind deer skins hung
from a granite cave
where two boulders rest,
ceiling black with soot—
left to his naked self
in these rocks,
beneath this sky,
that speak.

I remember the first time
it caught in my throat—
a gasp, up close, looming
above me—white-faced
cows and calves winding by.
I am yet not old enough
to stay and stare too long,
to learn another language.

                           I dress first putting on my socks,
                           Then my shirt—I need good habits.
                                               – Gary Soto (“Dr. Freud, Please”)

I never understood what drove him
to irrigate his grapes at sixty-eight.
We could set our watches to the minute

he passed by, mouthing new soliloquies
as another summer morning broke
in the shadow of the Sierras, or

at the end of vine rows, hoe in hand
at dusk, a silhouette with swashbuckling
overshoes titling at time, when

he could have paid a good man well
to do the job—until recently. Of all
the things I claimed I’d never be

like my father, I wear trails in the dirt
checking calves that don’t need me,
lest I forget my way—carving circles

in dreams that wake me to write
about how we got the harvest in the shed—
my young Gary Soto days bent beneath

a hazy San Joaquin Valley sun. Even
the old dog marks a track to encircle
the house and barks into the night.

                                        A stumblebum in scree.
                                                            – James Galvin (“The Heart”)

We write poetry, yet there are no rules,
no maps, no guarantees on our circumambulation
of loose time stacked, moment upon moment with

a stray epiphany. Traversing the fractured granite
boulders big as hay bales in Dead Man’s Canyon
to fish upstream, I found an old blue bottle

intact, placed it upon a rock for my way back
to camp on Roaring River nearly forty years ago.
The blue upon the speckled gray was like a beacon

that I forgot casting down the other side. The heart
is like that in the mountains, always leaping ahead,
easily sidetracked by reason. Surely someone

found and packed it home full of memories, perhaps
even placed it on the mantle above their fire—
my fragile blue bottle of hope for all I cannot see.

They’ve turned the heat up in October,
a few ambitious gods returning to the fire
to bake one last dessert sprinkled with acorn

crumbles for the quail—shook the oak tree
like a bear before the feed truck groaned uphill
for cows and babies hoping for relief. Top notches

bobbing in the road stir the Cooper’s Hawk to leap
and glide, a silent missile in and out of shadows.
Three rows of two stacked on edge ahead of six

flat butterflied, then capped and tied by three
more: twenty-two bales twice, engineered
for the short bed in the shower. Everyone

is on the acorns. Feral hogs and deer, first calvers,
bulls, next year’s heifers—even the saddlehorses
prune the blue oaks, woodpeckers having filled

every crack and bullet hole with a bumper crop,
ready for a hard winter. Jars of cerise pomegranate
jelly put up on the counter, it’s feeding time.