Category Archives: Poems 2014

The untamed eye dancing
in the fire-lit edge of mankind
cloistered in couched repose, keens

within a hawk’s heart flying,
gliding, riding a breath’s current
half-with and half-against

the invisible forces above us all.
And we can only watch the flight
and wonder, if we’ve a mind to.

Easy to be an activist—
to always have an enemy
in your crosshairs, one eye

closed and the other
inside a tube, magnified
without having to look

at anything else, without
having to question what
could have been seen.

You can cry ‘Wolf’
anytime you want, anytime
something close-enough

pops-up, watch everyone run
for a gun to shoot
your neighbor’s dog.

O’ myopic luxury
to not even see
that you just don’t know.

Locating the middle of a drought,
like chasing rainbows, is
impossible and important only

to guess how tough we must yet be—
how much barn grows empty,
how much heart, the cattle.

Another wet forecast dashed – – – –
storm door closing north, we are
amazed how easily a chance

rekindles hope, enflames skies—
its dry tinder igniting on a breeze.
We are like the good cows

ever-trusting in the hay truck,
in the pastoral gods and goddesses
returning to nurture the earth

next week? next month? next year?
We plan brandings around each chance,
yet to dream of giving-up.

The old man knows, looking up
across his dusty pen, ears alert,
head half-below his withers,

like a grandfather over spectacles,
watching me stir the gloaming,
light the barbecue for dinner,

say hello. No hurry now,
he holds this pose: a long paragraph
off his chest or the same sentence

I can only imagine, repeated—
but still can’t answer. He’s talking
over the fence and across

the brown Bermuda grass lawn—
the same look the Bay horse had
in his twenties that unnerved me

each time I haltered a dream
with younger horses. But this time
we both know we’re old.

                                                            for Red

A rough-haired cow relieved to graze apart
from fat calves at the bottom of the mountain
yearns to feel the chemise and manzanita claw

and comb her hide—stays away, sometimes
overnight for days. Weaned a little everyday
we breathe, those details that sustained us

fade into myth to fit each moment of discovery,
with each lumbering step uphill, until
we become less to finally wean ourselves.

Voilà! A playful calf again, humped to buck
at her side, only to run recklessly
across pastures before learning how to stop.

Without cloud, without wind,
just dust rising in an opaque haze,
months of yesterdays the same—

a canyon the gods have forgotten,
overlooked while taking their business
elsewhere. This is no lovers’ quarrel,

no slow strip tease, no small spat
to make up with passion,
it will take a while to ever trust

these gods again. Perhaps we never
received notice that they’ve been laid off,
sacked, canned in the reorganization

of the planet, their replacements: bumbling
neophytes in seductive, hard-bellied struts
without wear, without compassion.

Perhaps they have retired, given-in
to changing times to watch the show unfold
without water—you never know.

In January dirt,
a rattlesnake awake
warming in the road.

No grass, hawks wait on rocks,
falcons on cow chips,
close to the ground squirrels.

Winter haze, Great Blue statues
watch mounds at their feet
across bare landscapes

designed with black lines
following flakes of alfalfa,
no two the same—

while coyotes come
to the house for help—
but we cannot bring the rain.

                              It is certain the world cannot be stopped nor saved.
                                        – Robinson Jeffers (“Going to Horse Flats”)

We may not have met the hermit at Horse Flats,
begging for news, hoping for more, a turn
towards the good, unaware that our senses are

bombarded now with addictive sensations.
He is outside of our tightening vortex, free
of its forces, yet his lonely choice starves

to share years of one prolonged epiphany,
an overlapping and timeless state of self-sufficiency,
his world free from a certain course.

She has her own way
of pruning trees, not the gentle touch
nor the vision of an arborist,

instead she snaps and breaks,
thins the weak wood that will not bear
the weight of fruit, clears the forest

just to start over—she does not care
if we wring our hands, gnash teeth
or bleed before she accepts our flesh

over and over again. Our moment
means nothing to her, she will adjust.
The grass will spring back to life

beneath our step, mountains rise
and valleys fall to waste. Nothing is
as it was—how could it be?