Category Archives: Poems 2013

                         Words are for those with promises to keep.
                                    – W. H. Auden (“Their Lonely Betters”)

No better than what we say we’ll do,
our words, our bond with gods and you
that only death may overlook—
unless you print them in a book

of poetry. O’ sweet Jesus, why utter
sounds so cacophonous, or mutter
more than the rest of us can stand
to hear in seasoned rhymes like canned

hams that once were pigs—grunting,
rooting in their gruel, always wanting
more? And you, just your slice of pork
rewarmed, quiet on your fork.

Who then do we keep promise to,
the wilds, our gods, the fickle muse?
What then do we repeat in words
to hold more than refrains from birds?

                               Preserving the remnants while I stitch new days.
                               As usual, I’ll be following the Thread.
                                          – Jessica Spichalova (“Remnants”)

Funny that I am writing about landmarks
where the muses reside on this ground
as my daughter blogs about a white
wedding dress and shirt hanging in a closet,
clean and ready, with some life left in Kauai.

Oh, you skeptics—so great a leap across
the Pacific for some muse to make, that mental
space you cannot measure mathematically,
that stellar alignment, that genetic trace
we cannot prove! I believe what I want,

fortunately, and don’t need endorsement
for the existence of a place where voices
other than our own can be heard, collecting
remnants on separate landscapes, gathering
what seems to have gotten away from most.

                                                                 for Jess

Remnants

Our email discussion of “Agriculture and the Creative Muse” with Linda Hussa and Sean Sexton continues. My contribution this morning as follows:

I awoke this morning telling myself that we mustn’t forget the landmarks, those places where the memories are held, so that when we pass by them, our stories are triggered, remembered and retold. And if as proof, when they are removed to accommodate some notion of progress, the stories and history of a place become easily forgotten.

It does, of course, become part of our spirituality, but in the scope of ‘prompting’ a poem, or any art for that matter, our muses reside in these landmarks.

                                                            all the arts lose virtue
                        Against the essential reality
                        Of creatures going about their business among the equally
                        Earnest elements of nature.
                                                  – Robinson Jeffers (“Boats in a Fog”)

Early on, we trace small hands to paper
that look like everyone else’s, never knowing
just how these flat lines might reach

to hold or touch, grasp or caress our desire—
never imagining the scars they will collect
as we go about our business—that they may

grow into routines of feeding others, saving
and taking lives away from pain as if
we were gods and the world was ours.

At dusk around the fire you rekindled
with a gum wrapper, we watch the meat cook
with glass in hand, reliving routines

as quail come to roost with a heavy fluttering
above our heads, claiming their place in a tree
with imperative tittering, as someone

coasted off-course, hollers: ‘Where are you?
Where are you?’ And another answers,
‘Over here. Over here.’ As we talk.

By our hand, they understand our passion,
the earnest elements of our nature. But we
are family, this covey come to share our fire.

All the lines designed in constellations,
our max bet with each button push,
we gamble rides through time and win

a little friendship here, or love that lasts,
to find we’re human. How glorious is that!?
Some things need not be said of courses

taken, of slow gathers of the same ground
differently. It’s a random pull of the handle
where time and space spin in silence—

where the only things we know for sure
have been said before. Yet we believe in more
than what we see to choose our direction.

As an email precursor to our session at the Elko Gathering, suggested by Sean Sexton with Linda Hussa and Teresa Jordan, “Agriculture and the Creative Muse”, we’ve been discussing our topic hoping to offer a little more to our audience and learn something about what moves us to write, at the same time.

Sean Sexton: JD, I want to hear more about the cowboy muse, what that means to you.

JD: Of course, I love these kinds of questions when the answers can take different shapes, depending on the day. On some level, my muses and senses are one in the same, whether livestock or landscape, it is the feeling of knowing something intimately, or just thinking I do, that ‘prompts’ the poem. Once in a while, two unrelated words collide in a sound I like while I’m working that I end-up writing around, but for the most part, it is some rare, and not always wonderful, sense that I become aware of that kicks things off.

But this morning, it is your question.

THE WILD MUSE

She comes through time and hangs
in the boughs of trees, on peaks—
in intermittent streams of awe.

How you found it odd I wondered so
nearly fifty years ago, fumbling
with love, in another life alone

with wild skins on the Siskadee
seeing it all for the first time—
small, like a child exploring, only

to rest upon her grassy breast.
She leaves a broken trail of words
for me to find leading to surprises:

meadow epiphanies hemmed in pine
beneath a scree of granite ironies
above a river roaring constantly

at peace, not just anyone can see.
What muse are you that calls
through me to open space?

When the bias is bad,
they crowd and push
like children to play

the upside-down game,
turning it all on its head
to find a silver lining.

Out of the brush
like thin cows
to the hay truck,

they come on the run.
We feed our future
miles from the road

to hear the native echoes,
like old Joe Chinowith’s
who ‘knew a man once,

made lots of money,
tending his own business’,
or so my father said he said.

Out here,
it’s easy to look away
to find them busy

at what they do best—
as if they didn’t know,
hadn’t heard the news.

Some days the cards start
to fall into place, each move
opening-up another, like

sorting cattle from your desk
without help—except cattle
have sense to read your mind,

wait their turn in an order
you might not understand
about yourself, as it becomes

a dance on an invisible plane
only approached with time.
Some days the deck is stacked.

But religious or suspicious,
we begin to believe
in something we cannot see.

Best make friends with it.

                                        for Zach

An all-red heifer kept to breed
as an afterthought that calved
and strayed over the mountain,

run through fences by ATVs,
corralled for three weeks,
udder tight before shrinking—

before the brand inspector called
to pick her up in a muddy flat
between rains. We saw it all:

the errant pair chased
by determined desperation,
to miles of separation

when we loaded her big-eyed
silliness in the gooseneck,
“Where’s her calf?”

No one knows, looking dumb
in the face of the obvious.
We haul her home and hope

she finds the heifer
that looks just like her—
and damned if she doesn’t

come back into her milk.

The two sisters undressing by lantern light
in a tent at Ranger Lake, you belly-crawled
like a brave over pinecones and rock

to the edge of their screen, at fourteen—
then gone from us all by thirty-five.
All the broken hearts that saw it

coming, daring the wild and envious
gods you teased repeatedly. How
could we not love you for it—all

that we were not despite our tender times?
I only half-believed you were not gone,
riding ridgetops, this quarter century—

only half-believed you’d be more alive
than myth within my befuddled mind
looking for help to brand some calves.

                                                     for Craig

Solemn-faced, they helped
run the cable under the pickup
hooked to the red, homemade

tilt-bed trailer I paid
five hundred dollars for
thirty years ago, to winch

the Champion bull I bought
over-budget four days before—
his grain-fed weight,

the weight of all of it,
on the back-end lifting
as leveraged against the front

pushed down by the cable
that groaned, strained
against the grain as we pulled

him into place to haul
and cover with a plastic tarp
to have examined by experts

who couldn’t help him now—
who couldn’t help me call
the man who raised him.

                                   for Loren and Terri