Category Archives: Poems 2012

October takes all morning to dress,
scatters color after rain and leaves
her trail of indecision in low light

upon the ground—her closet full
of fading greens catches fire. Alas,
she has nothing left to wear, but

bright embers stirred to cover her
damp, brown skin like sequins.
Mesmerized, I wait beneath hillsides

of bare Blue Oaks for the first freeze
and good rain, for the long-limbed
Sycamores to dance naked in the creek.

With respect to size, my first herd was small
when I was ten, a dozen Hereford cows
grazing grand dreams, belly-high on green

with calves, all offspring from that one
bottled-fed orphan girl grown too big
for a makeshift shed—a start for a boy

when turned-out on grass that died.
Tears are poor consolation for the death
of dreams brushed with details, bred

and rebred to vanish in deep, damp feed—
or for the anger freed to find its home
within, yet I dream and will dream again.

The sun set and rose again
twenty thousand times,
eight hundred moons before

it finally dawned, before
the alabaster beams
fanned from dark clouds

that shrouded the divide—
the other side of everything
I may never see clearly.

It was a moment, one
of her last, the watershed
like disheveled bed clothes

cast in pastel canyons
below the snow,
a glorious painting hanging

forever in my mind,
which is a short time, really,
for a masterpiece

to inspire something more.
A voice from the canyons,
a song on a bird’s wing,

the dead speak
where we bury our grief
if we want to listen.

                                    With history.
                                    It’s quiet here.
                                            – James Galvin (“Little Anthem”)

We need not name the places, but
to jog the memory where my spring box lid
of two-by-eights and twenty penny nails

fit roughly against more mortar and rock
to keep the leaves out of a cool, dark cave—
but not the rattlesnakes. The lid and rock

are gone, like the Pohots, small pond below
now for the livestock. Not the spring
with the galvanized tank plumbed to missing

little houses wallpapered with newspaper
and glossy, 1940 detective mags—beneath
a Live Oak, it always had a longer name.

Missing from the bunch of sixty,
somewhere off to herself to calve
for the first time, dilated weeks

before the light contractions,
tightening without notice
growing to seize her flesh.

She left sometime yesterday
to become a mother, bring him out
of the trees and rocks, moving

slowly, stopping to let him suck,
then meander across the cobbles
of the creek bed pausing

while he caught up to the shadows
of oaks and sycamores. Now
a perfect, black white-faced cow.

I was fishing in my dream on a river,
wading thigh-high in tennis shoes and levis,
fly rod bowed, German Brown dancing on his tail.

I could not feel my toes pinched between boulders
and cobbles, nor the current, nor my knees braced
bone to bone as I cast again to catch a rainbow.

Fat hungry trout on a gray river, round rocks held
in the cutbank, canopy of dogwoods, cedar and pine—
pure delight behind an old man’s eyes searching

the next riffle and eddy, reading water beneath,
moving upstream with the grace of a heron, patiently
in my sleep—a final cut edited for prime time.