Category Archives: Poems 2015

WRITING A STORM

Posted on October 18, 2015 by | 6 comments

 

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Metal roof
machine gun fire,
strobe lightening
and rolling thunder:

cracks rip black
with jagged light,
redbud silhouettes
dance with the dark

               like the Fillmore,
               like the Shrine—
               endless bass
               rocks the canyon,

canons bark with flame
and the war goes on and on.

               Moist breath,
               eager heart electrified
               not to be contained
               within old skin.

               On stage:
                              the Doors
                              Janis Joplin wild with
                              Jimi Hendrix crescendos.

Last flashes break with dawn.
Inch-seventeen all in the ground—
she hasn’t lost her touch
with how to make it rain.

 

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DAWN ON THE MOUNTAIN

Posted on October 17, 2015 by | 2 comments

 

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October slips away from the sun
sliding south down the ridgeline
after a quick rain clears
               the air,
settles summer’s dust,
erases tracks
               for a day:

                              another beginning
                              to another adventure—
                              nearly 25,000 now.

No calls from beyond
Sulphur Peak:
                              old friend
to generations waking
from dreams and restless sleep.

On top in the brush
a 2” x 2” surveyor’s pole,
a Challenge Butter buck
               not quite in rut.
Spring poppy overlay of gold
winter cap of snow—
               never naked,
always changing clothes.

                                        ~

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: “(Extra)ordinary”

 

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RAINY SEASON

Posted on October 16, 2015 by | Leave a comment

 

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Glass in-hand,
we toast the dark morning’s
thunder and lightning
to the afternoon rumble
of another trace
from gray skies.

We have grown older
waiting—wishing, hoping,
praying to any god to hear—
for this time of year
when it might rain.

 

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REQUIEM FOR THE BLUE OAKS, 2015

Posted on October 14, 2015 by | 5 comments

 

December 2014

December 2014

 

Skeletons and broken limbs, old friends
of two or three centuries passing seasons
in one another’s shade, listening

to fathers telling sons how to survive.
Clumps of brown and yellow mistletoe
hang from arms like grapes becoming raisins,

all giving-in and giving-up their ghosts,
their loosening bark in lieu of acorns
to this bear invasion as the canyons

and draws crawl with shaggy scavengers
after the war is over—as the slowly fading
wounded watch, brittle roots without water.

This old girl will never be the same,
not reclaim her lush good looks
for generations that will never know

the difference nor her endless bounty.
Nothing stays the same beyond the void
of emptiness—everlasting, ever changing.

 

October 14, 2015 - Greasy, Horse Lot

October 14, 2015 – Greasy, Horse Lot

 

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PERSPECTIVE

Posted on October 12, 2015 by | Leave a comment

 

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There is no blank sheet—
no white, unblemished page
on which to letter words
together, even in the highlands.

Once when I was there in awe
and almost nothing, irrelevant
but to breathe and drink from streams
of melting snow off peaks

like granite teeth sunk into the blue,
blue sky, lost in my insignificance—
the paper I carried from the world
below was smudged and dirty.

So it is with we humans, never free,
never clean enough to pen
the perfect words without shadows,
without darkness leaking starlight.

 

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AMONG THE GODS

Posted on October 10, 2015 by | 11 comments

 

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The old ways fade
and disappear into the dust—
we leave few tracks

in the mountains,
in the canyons—
our hands are rough.

Red rivers run
through our hearts,
love and logic pulse

our slow ascension:
young horseback souls
grown old and weary,

we inhale the pitch
of pine, the cedar
smoke, silhouettes

facing one another
around the fire.
Red cinders rise

to join the stars
of forgotten time
among the gods.

                                    for Amy

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BETTER-NATURED

Posted on October 8, 2015 by | 1 comment

 

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When it rains, all the trees are leafless
women dead or dying, chests bared
to low gray skies, canyons running full

between limbs and hardened breasts, crying
helplessly with hope, with a taste for life.
And we join them, eyes cast upwards

to bare our thirsty flesh to gods returned
from far diversions, drink until the dust
runs off to settle with the mud.

We will sigh, rest easy for a moment—
count ourselves among the blessed
survivors, plod along with the better-natured.

 

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POSTCARD HOME

Posted on September 26, 2015 by | 8 comments

 

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Dear Dad, you never saw a drought like this,
four years running, so few cows left on the ranch—
nor I a war like yours: bait for Nazis in the Bulge.

The world has changed, the planet ever-changing:
ice caps melt, oceans rise, seasons out-of-sync
with what we know. New ground to graze

now that I am old. Nothing in the mountains
for bears to eat, they roll down ridges, track
dusty roads on the scent of fresh placentas,

lion pads everywhere you go. We cannot leave
this canyon, these calves, alone—all living
off this piece of ground that we are so bound.

 

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VISITING NIETZSCHE

Posted on September 24, 2015 by | 2 comments

 

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In the name of convenience
we deaden our senses
far from the basic elements
from which life rises
from this dusty, musty earth—

lost touch with old ways
of believing and seeing things
intrinsic to the spirit.
Yet we acquiesce to custom
and anonymity, bow

to technology more fallible
than a man’s word, or
become slaves and addicts
to selfish notions
where the lazy work the hardest.

                                       for Terri

 

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GODS ONCE

Posted on September 20, 2015 by | 2 comments

 

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As always, we don’t know
what’s coming
or when, but we prepare

for rain and cold
with odds in our favor.
There is no election,

no debate, no polls.
The fickle gods
write their own rules

and grin like hell
when we object
to their unfairness.

We were gods once
when we were children
with scraps of wood

and leaves for sails
cheering ships
floating down a furrow.

 

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