Category Archives: Poems 2012

In the chapel young Thompson
built brick by brick, light beams
lifted dust to God while visiting

clergy brought long sermons
and prayed that one of us
in the pews of blue blazers

would hear the call
that hung unanswered
from the hammered timbers

stretched across the cool
adobe walls, I was inspired
to dream on Sundays:

to preach a calloused,
hands-on gospel
of an understanding God,

to walk among common
quandaries and offer all
the solace I could muster.

Of the many daydreams
that danced beneath the red-tiled
roof, you followed true.

                                          for Bill Ripley

Red-headed woodpeckers take turns
at a Rainbird sprinkler dripping, sip
a drop at a time clinging to galvanized
pipe for hours in the summer, choose
a slow leak over a full water trough.

To survive, we adapt to the leftover
comforts of others, the leaks and
imperfections of progress, ignore
the loud and idle chatter striding by,
and focus on living with eyes open.

Almost tame, the Rock Wren cleans
the window screen for bugs. Roadrunners
stride tomato vines for worms. Coveys
of Quail move-in, followed by gray
hawks—all aware of the real news.

I could have written sooner to thank you
all—too many short notes with succinct
and caring phrases to count, too much
heart to consider, then bear, at once.

A man can drown in his own gratefulness
rising, hold his breath and hope he will float.
I think of all the doors cracked open for me,
peeks into other worlds, other ways of seeing.

It was all new once, each wisp a sign
of more to come, or to help me remember
my way home. But on the loose, youth
can be confusing chasing rabbits for the run

or fun of it. You may be still spinning in space
writing poetry with Ginsberg on Hale-Bopp,
but you gave me work when I needed it,
pride in what my hands could do, solace

in small and calloused accomplishment,
a place to go to find the truth flourishing
around me, wisdom and a strong distrust
of handsome faces and all government.

Cattle on pasture
wait for a truck
without knowing
their destination,

short-haul west
to Harris Ranch
feed bunks, or
1,500 miles east
to crowded pens
in the corn belt—

                    they don’t know
                    they sell
                    on the Internet
                    tomorrow.

Heavy steers
asleep now in the dark,
in the dry with
damp green dreams
of another day
like yesterday
where living is easy—
without worry or care.

They have become bored
with being full,
lying in the sandy shade
of sycamores, waiting
for a new zip code.

July Sunday, first light cool
through the screen door.
Dogs asleep, the same
black line of ridgetops
falls from a lavender sky,
thin underbelly of the moon
in space exposed beneath
a bright morning star.

Kubota cowboy, crossing
the dry creek bed
in last month’s
depressed tracks,
cobbles black and flat
to dump yesterday’s lawn
clippings to the bulls,
chewed already fine.

I own the road
in dawn’s shadow, sunlight
burning slowly like a fire
down the canyon’s east slope.
Pump water, load hay
before the sun hits the barn.

Downstream from there,
two young bicyclists
peddle easily
in identically sleek
racing outfits
smile in and out of shadows
of first light streaking
through sycamores
spread down the channel.

The morning is hazy
along the periphery, but
the world is changing,
even on Dry Creek.

The creek disappears,
runs underground to the roots,
up thick, gray trunks of sycamores
to fill limbs and turn leaves
into dark green canopies of shade
over an occasional pothole
of warm water that herons
and coons have already gleaned,
but for the underwater bugs.

Sycamores are greedy,
take all the water they can,
believe in unlimited growth
they can’t support, lose limbs
with the crack of a rifle shot:
                    leave wilting proof
                    of gravity
                    upon fences
                    along the road
                    over and over again.
They never learn.

July is sweltering,
air heavy as days bake
into still landscapes.
Everyone is up and out
stalking one another
at the first hint of light.
And come the gloaming,
rabbits run from shade to shade,
the bleached-blond ground
waves with roadrunners herding
mom and pop coveys
of quail on wheels
from cover to water
with serious tittering.

Coyotes come close
to the house in the dark,
bait the dogs to bark
until the lights come on
to dress for work—
or confess on paper
before the brain
stews like a tomato
in July outside.

                                        i

They will be looking for yellow metal,
grease-stained men with steel shanks
and wide blades that friction with the earth
will shine like silver against her gentle slope.
In time, she will lay flat and lifeless, supine,
to be plowed and plowed until unrecognizable—
until she looks like town.
                                                             Meanwhile,
all the wild cattle, all the birds, all the native
ghosts know the way through the brush
to the ridgetops, and they will watch and shake
their heads once more in dismay—ever since
the Red Coyote came and felled an oak.

                                        ii

There will be talk of growing things,
roads and water, jobs and taxes,
prosperity for everyone—mitigation
and litigation to make it alright. Good
friends will forget how to listen
and judges will lean toward money
and votes, dreaming of sleeping
with the sketches of planners
                                                             where she used to be.

                                        iii

This is how we’ve tamed the West,
raping landscapes, extracting value.
We have learned nothing
                                                             over and over again
as we grow senseless, without feeling
for the ground that has fed us graciously—
busy felling oaks, redwoods,
and sycamores—busy filling towns.

                                                            And then
it was over, all the overlapping crescendos
of the latest news, a little bit left at each gate
beginning at the asphalt without a white line
widened, years back, when the gravel trucks
broke it up, raped the upstream channel, felled
sycamores born before Sir Francis Drake
claimed the California coast for Queen Elizabeth—
bleeding stumps of thick-trunked men and women
collapsed on their sides, no longer reaching out
to shade above and underground, high-graded
for the freshest alluvium and leaving an ugly,
150-acre pit in her breast, extracting her soul
before they went belly-up, the decade-old scar
haired-over now with willows and mule fat
like a generic, flat land creek.
                                                            April left
some of it with the horned bulls looking for bales
of alfalfa to rub off the truck, and by the second gate
her eyes fixed upon the creek and the colors
of Wood Ducks hustling their broods upstream.
She stopped in the crossing, listening to the rush
of water between her wheels as they disappeared
into the weeds along the bank.
                                                            By the third gate,
the rock face of Terminus Dam loomed
beyond the flat across the Kaweah canyon,
the only straight line this side of Blue Ridge
and the Great Divide, its control tower and space age
hydro plant and poles as the last attempt to train
and harness the whims of weather like a reliable
horse under the wildest of circumstances.
                                                            At Belle Point,
looking back over cattle grazing below,
looking back beyond the Kaweah’s riparian green
into the San Joaquin, orchard after orchard blurred
into busy, hazy towns as April closed the gate
behind her to climb the slope into the saddle
to look down into the lake, into Greasy Creek
turned Cove since the 60s, houseboats lashed
together into a raft of recovering partiers.
                                                            Across the canyon
on the switchback of the old CCC road, she
imagined men with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows,
mule drawn Fresno scrapers, and below, thin
evidence of the steep and overgrown homesteaders’
wagon track above Spoon Rock, narrow as a cowtrail
with some deer, does, caught out in the open, frozen
as April stopped to watch. Black dots of cows and calves
on the far ridge, and up ahead in the rock bluffs,
a coyote paused and disappeared into the granite’s blue
lupine before the fifth gate, heavy lifting off its rest, but
swinging easily into the Lower Field. April was home,
spooking a bobcat, then quail hurrying up the road.
The grass was tall and the world she left was gone.

                                                                              for Earl McKee

The heat thumps in your head
in short lines with long vowels
in Arizona,
                    mantras of pain
                    without rain
                    in July—

day after day deliriums,
ripe tomato red hallucinations
pulsing behind the eyes.

The flesh burns and blisters
in the light moving from shade
to shade to wait for darkness

when we can dream of dying—
any kind of ascension to beat the heat.

                                                            – for Amy

                                    i

The near-world of humans sleeps in,
no engines moan up the road early
on a summer Sabbath dawn, long
in the half-light pausing between
day heat and darkness, sky white
with the coming of the sun like
headlights over the rise of the Sierras,
buying time to inhale the morning
with their shadow, all that remains
to shield me now, parents gone.

                                    ii

These modern times of ease
and magic, of speed and gain—
prolonged instants complicated
with deceit and the juvenile in men
fall away, exfoliate like granite domes
a little everyday, as souls exposed,
storied landmarks from another time
that wait their turn to speak,
to whisper ways to shed it all
and breathe-in this hour’s peace.

                                    iii

God has abandoned this canyon,
left it on its own for early emergencies,
spread thin and stretched from steeple
to spire for quick apparitions
high in the shadows and stained
glass, glimpses of the light distorted
for the sure and self-righteous
in regimented towns. It is His cross
to bear, busy on the Sabbath
with the most basic flaw of all.