Category Archives: Poems 2013

You should know how
to read sign, find water,
follow tracks and stars
and tell about it—how
to start a fire in the rain
skin a rabbit, cook the meat
and pick your teeth with a bone.

You should know how
to make the mundane rich
with detail and symbolism,
start your own religion, quietly—
to look through the eyes
of animals, trees and birds
to see yourself as common.

You should know how
to draw lines, share space
and learn to help.
You should know how
to create the kind of joy
you cannot buy
with cash or credit.

Low hills worn smooth as flesh,
summer blonds with different shades
of grazing play in one another’s shadow

at dusk and dawn, a plain and treeless
nakedness I trace, pausing with my eyes,
to touch ridges, gaps and valleys falling

into Live Oak canyons, gentle slopes frozen
in an undulating moment drawn and prolonged
with each breath in uncertain light—slipping

slightly, she comes alive, dressing differently
with each season. At work early, young herons
greet me. We nod and say good morning.

The old girls know before we go, read
our minds, movement and the stars aligned
this time of year when they’ve given up their calves,
ready for home and breeze beneath the Buckeye shade
and cool dirt stirred by generations—something sure.

If you turned them loose they’d find their way,
but they’d rather graze than climb the hill
the young girls question, working edges, lingering
while feigning naiveté, looking off towards memory
and possibility other than a season with matrons

without patience. No one really tries the horses
who know their way around the rock pockets,
down trees and steepness, daring independence
with their eye and sidehill two-step. The bunch
lines out, everyone having fun headed home.

Swamp coolers all we had, we ran around half-naked
as kids in summers over a hundred, men and women
worked the fields in broad-brimmed hats, burlapped

gallon jugs at the end of each row. Sunscreen from
March to November, I’m wearing down, can’t take the sun
as I wait under a crescent moon above the undulating

ridgeline, our supine maiden sleeping, for enough light
to get the day started, load of hay ready in the dark.
It’s all planned now: catch a horse, feed the calves,

change irrigation water, then back to saddle and leave
to sort the calves from cows and haul them down the hill
to feeders full of alfalfa to weigh, worm and wean.

Dust from a hundred years of cows will boil up
from the old corrals, bandana bandits going slowly,
tip-toeing horseback so we can all breathe easier.

We were drawn as children to enclosures
like calves to the comfort of fallen limbs—
our dark bat and board sheds and barns

long without paint, dry wood curling
at the rough-cut edges leaked splintered
dust beams, enough to add chapters

to our adventures. We would visit town
friends on horse-drawn implements
saved just in case like old farmers do, play

doctor, lawyer, merchant and Indian chief
or build forts of walnut leaves in the fall,
dig foxholes with Army Surplus shovels

to shoot the Japs and Jerries, then die
dramatically upon the bulwarks, only
to rise again as if sowed by serpent’s teeth.

You remember that she was kind
it seemed beyond herself—beyond
all other wanting of this world

of angles and leverage. Her face
has no name, no one moment
saved to hang upon the walls

we pass by and would ignore
if she did not surround us all—
so infectious, she tends to feed

and please herself without trying,
her tongue upon a suckling calf
or kitten. Her open smile

and eyes in a thousand faces
you have always envied,
that touch you still, that fill

a pause prolonged for a life
and you remember her
for she was that kind.

The old trees have eyes
and gaping mouths
that try to speak
of what they’ve seen
before I came.

The granite grins
and looks inside my mind
to imagine everything
that has never been, yet.
The Red Tail follows

from oak to oak. Quail
run on invisible wheels
ahead of the tittering
of little birds scattering
the news as they go.

Without his shadow,
the coyote can’t see
his silhouette from the shade,
does not know that I can
act as obvious as he.

A doe and fawn freeze.
A bobcat lopes off
as I arrive. Everyone becomes
a messenger, even me,
packing salt to cows.

The dead and early leaves of Buckeyes cling
to great arms of flesh broken under low snows
look much the same in May as those rooted
in the earth, all shades of brown—yet severed.

Live Oaks on their sides like dominos collapsed
in the middle of a green thicket. Blue Oaks
stand like statues to disfigured soldiers after
war—all casualties of time—time will repair.

But a man steps lightly, carries a chain saw,
clears the way to mend his fences, rebuilds
surveyed lines through the downfall,
over rocks and rills you can’t feel on paper.

It is beyond us, always going on and on,
sometimes growing wilder in the process
when man’s dreams weaken with his flesh.
And therein the hope for new beginnings:

fresh spring starts and stems to learn again—
the great nature of things going on without
attention, without notice that still pumps
within us yet. We just don’t know it.

The phrase in my head,
the last line to the chorus
of an unwritten song—

my upbeat blank sheet
that needs to smile
at the truth, to be both

pleased and vulnerable, a
Bobby Bare song that applies
to loving and dying well—

when it’s all done,
there’s nothin’ more
to leavin’ than goodbye.

Perhaps her eyes go
early in the first verse
to search unfamiliar scenery,

then his retreat
to the wordless sounds
of rivers and streams—

one we can all sing
when there’s nothin’ more
to leavin’ than goodbye.