Category Archives: Poems 2014

Out there in the dark, they move
between trees, shadowless
to get a count while we sleep—

all the natives, man and beast alike
making livings here before our time—
before we become one of them

to measure progress by. In dreams
they come and go, offer news
from the past, tempt us once more

to stay a course they could not endure.
With no grass to hide their track,
they rise to the surface of this bare dirt.

You can see everywhere they’ve been,
where hard times changed their minds.
We’re naked now, almost abandoned.

The Governor has come with a mouthful of marbles,
but no Demosthenes, cornered before cameras
after meeting big farmers in dark back rooms,

eyes shift through closed doors, see San Francisco,
Santa Cruz. ‘Moonbeam’ in the 70s when he ran
with Ronstadt, he’s still undecided. Driest year

on record yet, it’s about the water that isn’t—
and who gets it, if he declares a drought. Playing
politics: pleasing people like cattle—who gets hay

little water irrigates. I am but dust on the window screen
to Pine Street, Exeter, 1958 when I shook his father’s hand,
watched California meet the future with accomplishment.

This is not poetry, nor a cry-baby rant. This is drought
no matter what we declare or who says it—lean
times when Mother Nature makes all the rules.