October 29, 2010
June 27, 2015
Built for more than the cattle needed,
I reflect upon my one extravagance
now dry and cracked around its edges
like discarded dreams, having shed all guilt
exchanged for emptiness and worry
when every trail leads to Railroad Spring.
Ripe raspberry stain
on a yellow tablet—
one of several waiting
when I got back
from busy somewhere in the heat.
First-year canes producing
delight again and again.
You speak with gestures—
this paper blessed
with remembering.
Happy Birthday, Robbin!!
Posted in Deck Poems, Photographs, Poems 2015
Tagged gestures, raspberries, raspberry stain, yellow tablet
We are not spirits only
when gravity works
flesh into dirt, pulls
bones into the womb
of all things as roots cling
and search for water.
Like drought-dead oaks
with loosened bark, clumps
of mistletoe hanging black
on the other side of Christmas,
Apollo’s hot breath
on our burnt lips kissed
with summer’s revenge.
It is not the dark rain
that dissipates strength,
weakens wooden handles:
the hands-on tools
for arms and legs
as hoe and shovel twist
and bow, decompose
beneath unrelenting heat.
We are not spirits yet
to defy mortal forces:
the bodies politique
that wear us down to find
our own ascension within
delirium under the sun.
We will walk with gods
soon enough and envy
this state of gravity.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2015
Tagged aging, ascension, body politique, Drought, summer heat
A hundred and ten degrees
in an empty pen
where we watched him
stumble to his feet,
where we forget
twenty years of trying—
that a man was king
with all he needed
to get the job done.
Time swallows memory
like a snake
chokes a meal down
to the present tense—
outliving horses
before we fade
from this landscape.
We can ask too much,
plead for compassion
from invisible gods,
compensation for
the heroic hearts
we have held
within our fingers,
within our family.
for Red Hot Montana
Posted in Deck Poems, Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal
Tagged horses, pensioners, Red, Red Hot Montana
A man gives up early in the summer,
too warm for wine, too hot for evening
poetry to endure, before darkness closes
the oven doors to bake in the black.
The Kings River calls, trout singing
from the riffles, asking why, when
trails of natives and early settlers rise
into the mountains, spread like webs
into the pine cabins and camps
beside the mantra of running water
through the night. I go early to bed
to get there in my dreams.
Posted in Poems 2015
Tagged "Mountains and Rivers Without End", heat, mountains, rivers, summer, weather
Late June, water scarce for cows
heavy with September’s calf
reclining like hippos in the shade
of thin-leafed oaks. On vacation,
gathered to catch a breeze, they
gossip silently, chew their cuds.
They don’t know, don’t worry,
watch us scurry from the distant
well to tank to empty trough—
listen to us talk with tools
as the morning’s entertainment.
Miles from asphalt, we make
our circles on dirt tracks
from pasture to pasture until
the rains might come November.
They learn early
to be a covey,
to stick together
and look out
for one another—
where Bobcat walks
and Hawk waits
on a bare branch,
where water is
before they die.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal
Tagged San Joaquin Valley Quail, water, water trough
Horseback, the girls work
cattle in the dust, sort cows
from calves before hauling
off the hill to the weaning pen:
a quiet dance to a rhythm
I can only see through boards
as cows ask with their eyes
before moving towards the open
space a horse has made
to leave their calves behind.
No loud bravado spurring
pirouettes into dirt clouds.
I turn away and walk
to the pickups and goosenecks—
remove my maleness
from these corrals that hold
a hundred years of urgent
echoes: men making mistakes
to invent new profanities.
Instead, the perfect sense
of girls instructing girls.
My pagan sunrise hangs over the black ridge
reaching for the saddle this side of Sulphur
Peak with blinding light, this native place
where women healed themselves—to endure
this longest day of hundred degree heat.
Each day shorter, we move with confidence
towards October, imagine gusts beneath
dark clouds that bring the storm gods closer
to bless this dry and dusty dirt with rain.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal
Tagged solstice, Sulphur Peak, summer, sunrise
Afterlife outside
the scars on my hands overlap,
a crisscross map of urgencies
and feeble judgment,
of blindly reaching for
admirable manhood at ten,
digging a bullet from a post,
pocket knife folding
to the bone of a left finger.
The hay hook at sixty
sunk into the back of my right
wrapped in blue bandana
until the steers were shipped—
a long white mountain range
that intersects a short ridge
I have forgotten.
Outside white cuffs
they look like clubs—
but they have loved
from the beginning,
yet wear no scars for that.
drycrikjournal 