My feet have slowed—
my eye measures distance
and my mind weighs
the importance of moving
as I withdraw
from all the magic
flashing the horizon
like explosions
of another war
that will not wound me,
fatally. This time
is mine to spend,
frugally. Summer sighs
into September shadows
as I wait for storms
to wash the outside
world clean away.
Too old to play football
or politics anymore,
I hear colors sing
without a score.
It is nothing, really, but a damp breeze
through the screen door rattling papers
on my desk, clearing the evidence
of last night’s flat bread from the kitchen
before returning to morning black—
light drops on a metal roof.
Fourth dry summer of drought,
it sweeps dust from my brain,
teases hair on my bare chest
as if I were wild, alive again—
as if we might escape this hell,
rinse the taste from our mouths.
Too early to storm, it is nothing, really,
but a damp breeze playing rain—
a few gods revisiting survivors
and the dead—playing with the possibility
of change. Once again, I am reminded
that nothing stays the same.
For a moment,
we succumb,
give in, yield
to our senses,
to the unknown—
forgetting everyone
we have been
or may ever be—
to let each second
wash over us
as we consume
each detail
that becomes
our flesh melting
into timelessness
gone beyond
any hope
to hold its shape,
waiting to explore
that prolonged moment
as if in the womb again.
Yearning is an easy look
backwards, a slow-moving canvas
colored to taste, shaded by habit.
Our war whoops but echoes
fading in canyons on trails of broken
brush long-overgrown, mocking
our wild-eyed blindness
since sharpened and tempered
by scars upon scars and time.
Now is the moment we begin
to be all we can—to revel
in its rich accomplishment.
The pair of eagles
returning early to ride
our foothill thermals
elicits surprise:
‘what do they know that we don’t?’
we agree to say.
No water, no place
to fish in a four-year drought—
it must be something.
We begin
when calves come
trailing their mothers
out of seclusion
to hay—children
added to explore
this old ground,
wind shuffling leaves.
In their eyes,
fresh innocence
and a chance
for improvement.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal
Tagged beginnings, Calves, innocence, September
Billowing from behind the barn before dawn
rising, clouds hang and drift, coat everything
as saddle horses wake to play over fences
in August, when there is no dew nor brittle stems
to cling to. Expectant mothers waddle to the water
trough, dragging their feet in soft, deep powder
pounded fine enough to float, to trail behind them.
Within the Palo Verde’s safe thatch of thorny limbs,
the reveille of quail brushing dreams from their eyes
before their morning march to the rock pile
in the middle of the bare horse pasture—even
the tiny feet of laggards catching-up stir the dust.
The first dry leaves lift in a swirl of weather changing,
distant premonitions that stir the flesh to ask
if the stage is set to settle this ever-present dust
with rain.
From my desk window, I watch the fire
where the far ridge drops into the next
watershed, Rio de los Santos Reyes,
to follow mushrooming thunder cells
billow white as backfires collide:
cedar, fir, pine and redwood up in smoke
late afternoons and imagine the heat
and trees exploding, smudged yellow
Nomex—men, and women too, on the fire line,
exhausted and bleary-eyed as the red tails
of air tankers sail back and forth over me.
Sixty thousand acres plus of back country
charred by a living, breathing monster
twenty-five percent contained. The wind
has changed and cleared our canyon
as thunder cells push eastward up the Kings.
From the ridge and from the air they watched
a lightning strike run in the rocks
for over a week, thought it would never
jump both the river and the road—
could have put it out anytime.
All the snakes in our mind
rise like cobras
from baskets of grass, or
flat heads parting dry stems
moving towards us.
Even the Yokuts tried
to tame them, or at the least
make peace with the dark
agents of the Underground.
We track circles on the same ground
through brush and granite rock,
over mountains and down canyons
patched with spooky skeletons
of trees, broken limbs at their feet.
Last year’s blond and brittle feed
folds into dust under foot, under wheel
into decent firebreaks swirling around us
as we check springs and clean water troughs
measured with our eye. We carry hay,
fat cows come running six to the bale
once a week, fresh calves knocking
at the door of a new and wobbly world—
waiting to inhale one hundred degree heat.
Too soon to rain, we plod like cows
in dusty circles, all soft trails
lead to water and shade, or to the hum
of solar pumps in abandoned wells.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal
Tagged August, broken limbs, Calves, cows, Drought, granite rock, Greasy Creek, Hay, photographs, poetry, rain, water, weather
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