Category Archives: Poems 2015

HIS HERONS

 

Easter 2014

Easter 2014

 

After rain in spring, I see my father
standing among a half-dozen others
atop fresh mounds of dirt, hear him

praise the Great Blue Heron as the best
‘gopher-getter around’. As the creek
warms, he glides up canyon early,

spends his days wading shallows,
coasting home in the gloaming.
Punctual, you could set your watch

by his circles to work each day,
depending on season and crop.
When it all mattered too much,

he’d slip up the road to check
the feed and fences, the condition
of my cows grazing with his herons.

 

IMAGINATION

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How easily she could say,
‘it’s all in your mind—’
deny, dismiss what she knew

could be true, if we let it
when we were children
pretending to be grown up—

playing games
with our imaginations,
mornings drumming music

on eucalyptus roots
before the school bus stopped
our spontaneous chants.

With rusty tools and sticks,
horse drawn relics
and Model T wrecks

we took off for town—
took turns driving
wild steeds or hot rod cars

depending on time—just
as much as we wanted
to get there.

 

 

WPC(4) — “Serenity”

 

CLARKIA ENHANCED

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Unfolding into space, hills
from peaks to plains unending
time beyond and past

the horizons of this moment
resting among the eroded
where I am near-nothing,

these specks of rock
spread out before me
like petals opening—

my nakedness
laid bare
as part of the landscape.

 

 

WPC(2) — “Serenity”

 

SIERRA TIDY TIPS (Layia pentachaeta ssp. pentachaeta)

Sierra Tidy Tips, Greasy Creek, 4.6.11

 

Leaking into a dry winter,
spring’s wild nectar drips
with sweet abundance.

 

 

AFTER DARK

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A boy’s bed upon the ground,
I stared at stars and wondered
if I was worth keeping alive

as I slept, if I could trust
the darkness to hold me
safe until morning—

looking up through
all the bright holes
of a rusty bucket sky,

connecting dreams
with a greater light
beyond the night—

I drew lines in the sky,
played dot-to-dot
instead of counting sheep.

 

LEARNING TO FLY

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Of all the spontaneous art, none
more trustworthy, more enthralling
than the wild mirrors—of heart

and grace without guilt pulsing
to get free, rising with the ascension
of ducks from cattails, clear droplets

raining from webbed feet etched
to hang on white cloud walls
to draws us in—and then, like

windows out to where we might
want to be—like poetry, learning
to fly with words a little at a time.

 

IN A FOG

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But traces in quiet fog:
ridgeline of the barn roof,
cold parts of the corral

float in and out of gray
closing in upon our fire—
forms of horses look

for hazy movement
in this fuzzy moment
shut away from hills

and towns beyond, the world
and its miseries. All
we have accomplished near

at hand, close to fading
into nothingness
and I am relieved

of the weight of urgency—
perfectly helpless
to change a thing.

 

LEAVING WITH STAFFORD

 

I imagine that the young men
I went to school with have retired
by now, given up their desks
for free-wheeling possibilities

to coast downhill grades, collecting
their rewards and all the promises made
to themselves, over and over again.
I truly wish them all the best.

And I suspect the girls have become
wise grandmothers with practical advice,
keeping secrets in ceramic cookie jars
with noisy lids like I remember.

Leaving with Stafford, I retire
from a world too large to digest,
and go to that far place for the familiar
sign, those recognizable tracks

where wild makes sense of circumstance.
We are collecting short stories
like mushrooms in wicker baskets
before they fade and melt into the ground,

discussing how we’ll sauté them over fire
in butter and garlic to melt in our mouths
instead. Already we can feel their wild
flavor rage in our veins, like venison,

as we shed the old flesh, find keen eyes.
All the ghosts will rise beneath the stars
to gather at our fire, faces flickering
in the darkness to share the light.

 

FINDING ORDINARY

 

© 2013 Earl McKee Photo

© 2013 Earl McKee Photo

 

Old men in the branding pen
hope for grace

to find the feel of singing loop
slide between their fingers—

of hoof dance timed and shaped
to catch two feet, slack to dally horn

come tight, as if it were nothing
out of the ordinary.

 

ECHINOPSIS AT DAWN

 

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Not a shadow without light,
brief morning flowers
from the blackest night.

 

 

WPC(2) — “Shadowed”