Category Archives: Poems 2012

The old oaks spoke patiently,
listening to each confusion
                    press for direction—
but I followed the churn
                    of rivers narrow
                    beyond the timber
                    in the granite
where the stars are many.

A man is almost nothing
                    in the mountains—
                    small creature
set apart in time for awe.

The other world of men
exfoliates and settles for
                    the clutch of gravity
and growth decomposing
                    in the bottoms—
                    here weather wears
                    the worn away
where the stars are many.

No need for money
                    in the mountains—
                    unless to start a fire
to keep the cold at bay.

Black silence beneath a waning moonrise:
a golden crescent, Venus trailing. Too hot
for night life, coyotes and raccoons are still

tossing in yesterday’s shade, rewriting
the same line half-a-dozen different ways—
a circular prowling they can’t get beyond

as the sun loops back into a blaze of day.
The night sky is ripe for gazing into the infinite
soul of the universe we can never see clearly,

for homemade theories stirred with myths
and illuminated meteors escaping somewhere—
for calming my delirium with blank paper.

A man steps out of the forest, a close family
of oaks in the shade of one another. Nothing
is as it was. Dry channels of rivers crumble

in a desert where green, ripe heads once bent
heavy with the breeze, in a lifetime’s flash
of time past and time to come—one moment

without beginning or end—a continual wash
of colors nevermore the same. The dull sacrilege
of leather-skinned mountain men felling the first

bountiful oak before native eyes bled into brown
forts that became settlements, before the gray
railroad towns and blond dry-land farming,

before the irrigated ground was planted to houses
surrounding bright cities run on more of the same.
And she gave-in and continued giving as she has

and will again, for time is nothing, just the passing
of a brush stroke on an endless panorama of ever-
changing colors that we are washed within.

The hoots in the dark grow closer
to sounding similar, a conversation
from ground to tree, a rustling of leaves.

Muffling a weak calf into the hollow
of my hand, she turns, looks back
and finds what she has hidden in the grass.

You nicker with him when he’s done well,
let gentle whinnies roll into your laughter.
Howling with coyotes since children,

we become them, feel each tone wash
through our flesh. You never forget
what the words mean, if you’re listening

—for sound and motion of the universal dance—
for the truth in heart and mind. When Mountain
Lion gathered the animals at Wuknaw,

at the head of Antelope Valley, each perched
in a circle of rocks that yet remain, they agreed
to create another creature to speak their tongue.

Either side of the Sierras, unpeopled shores of great lakes
when someone had to hold his breath, swim to the bottom
mud and bring the fine and putrefying ooze up to shape
humans. Helldiver or turtle, not far from scientific truth.

Nothing in a myth is exact, nor among the grasses
where Blue Jay plants oak trees randomly. The First
Ones lived with changing luck, knew the language
of the animals, took what they needed and wasted nothing

but time. The moon came and went. A marvel rising
within the oak limbs, within the flesh! celebrated
by everyone. Here the women came to watch her
form asleep, breathing atop the mountains, a golden

pendant rising from her breast. A sure revisiting,
the animals still hold their breaths, gather and await
new songs and stories of the hundred and fifty years
they’ve been away, wandering, wondering, why.

We move towards fall, the sun yet high and blistering—
like cattle shade to shade, if we move at all—a time
to ruminate and write, to irrigate the roots in half-light,

and measure the blush of fruit surging on the vine.
The good and evil of this world have no perfect borders,
no kings or queens on this clod to rule the weeds and pests,

to banish the sycophants, all come to celebrate the harvest.
And for a moment in the mind, a gardener can become a god
to plot his Eden, and find pleasure in his small Genesis

that cooks beneath the sun in good earth and water.
This is the wellspring of all men’s dreams that now
they have forsaken, the sun yet high and blistering.

                                                                       —as we part
                                     the foam that wind scatters,
                                     and leave our footprints behind
                                     to fill with brine and disappear.
                                               – Quinton Duval (“Valentine”)

Somewhere on the beach we leave ourselves.
Even our claw marks in the mountain’s rock
fade with time as traces only we remember

as important. The coast is clear as Sierra skies
after a storm. The slate is clean, interrupted only
by a passenger jet, its red contrail waning.

I remind myself to make each moment rich,
moving slowly to see more than the end
of an accomplished life. Forget the colorful

opinions clinging to the limbs of trees,
forget the political cacophony as just another
man’s pastime. Come walk a ways with me.

Two more loads of hay sail up the narrow road,
preceded by a diesel squeeze, decelerating
in pre-dawn light, looking for a barn to fill

before they can’t turn around, or back down
in these hills—we know about commitment,
the long way ‘round, the scenic tour

and feel like squirrels packing again for winter—
forethought not for us but for good cows
in this stale debate about climate change.

Expensive alfalfa, but cheap insurance
these old knees abhor where the denim fades,
old dreams creaking as I unlock the gate.

Drought Nebraska must be the heart breaking
as it grinds miniature ears and short corn stalks
into silage bins, young men wondering why

the old men stayed to make the payments
on new equipment they can’t use now,
or if punching a clock is even possible in town.

Dumb-assed farmers know no better than to hang
it all on a rainbow somewhere in the middle
of the old bread basket, in the belly of us all.

Grabbing hooks to climb and square the stacks,
I try to look like an agile, sure and wise survivor,
as saggy, baggy britches bound into a limp leap.

I take instruction from a fast-talking Portagee
I don’t understand—two-faced Janus in the squeeze—
but finally figure as he moves last year’s inventory

together. First in, first out keeps it fresh like poetry
bleeding from the sap of trees, floating like fallen leaves
to mold and rot—enrich the earth with song and thought.

                                                            The future, after all,
                                        is what comes after us.
                                           – Quinton Duvall (“Early Report”)

The full moon has fallen behind the ridge
and it is dark again before hot dawn spills
white heat in molten streams over the divide.

There is no hurry now, no rush to arrive
ahead of time to catch tomorrow’s news,
to know beyond this moment stretched

between few stars while you are sleeping,
dreaming in our foreign tongue of touching
details, the delicate webs of spiders spun

overnight that will glisten soon like silver,
the dawn’s long shadows ours to devour.
But we plan our days to graze the gloaming.

Slow boat from Edinburgh
around the Cape at eighteen
to teach the Indians in Fresno,

youngest of four daughters
wrought by the headmaster
of a proper school for girls –

a cork upon the ocean apart
from the main, from family
and culture in the steam

ship’s wake, but for what
she packed with her.
After a buggy-ride courtship,

she married an orangeman,
a horticulturist of all stripes.
And in the 30s, she had a bed

for Marian Anderson when
no one in Exeter would have her,
once they learned that she was black.

Lights in her bedroom
before she died at 92.
I have to believe her.