Category Archives: Poems 2016

LEFTOVERS

Posted on December 6, 2016 by | 6 comments

 

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You escape your sister dying
as we make friends with death
at dinner: leftovers and bottles

of red wine to replay our side
of magnificent dear departures
rich with pride, all the ashes

left to live in symbolic places—
living monuments wrought
by hand to absorb our grief.

We knew them all, see them
stand around the table being
near, each fine quirk strong

as when they breathed mirth
into their last words we call
forth as we remember them.

We move up a growing list
with boozy laughter knowing
we’ve done well, been lucky

despite diminishing diversions
well-beyond this moment full
of exceptional examples.

                                                  for JEG

 

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DECEMBER CEREMONY

Posted on December 5, 2016 by | 2 comments

 

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Green blades and stems reach
beneath the dry turned gray
with recent rains—mildewed
protection from the cold holds
moisture before decomposing,
relinquishing steep and rocky
promises to tender chance, to
the next generation of grasses
to become heir to this ground
as we come off the mountain
with Manzanita loaded,
chain saw lashed, descending
slowly, talking about nothing
but what rumbles in our heads
and hearts—our December
ceremony saving, spending,
banking energy the old way.
                    
                    for Bodhi on his birthday
 

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ODE TO MANZANITA

Posted on December 4, 2016 by | 6 comments

 

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                             …he fed the young flame with wisps of dry grass
                             and with the tiniest dry twigs.
                                           – Jack London (“To Build a Fire”)

A fair piece from the Yukon,
Jack—nothing warms cold bones
like a good fire. We, too, need

a flame to feed a woodstove
oak, the standing dead and fallen
to adversity and time,

and start with broken posts:
split coastal redwood pencil-thin
into a chimney teepee thatch

on crumpled newsprint
before the match leaps to catch
a hungry blaze, inside

shadows dance and touch,
begging brittle Manzanita’s
hard red heart that dulls a chain,

severed limbs of lichened skeletons
wait to burn hot and easily
to prepare the seed, lick the oak

with fire. And glowing early
morning coals banked in ash
start Manzanita sticks a flash.

 

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ETHEREAL POSSIBILITIES

Posted on December 3, 2016 by | 10 comments

 

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Where the inversion layer dissipates into crystal mist at dawn,
pixies rise in the canyon, float towards the light, or so it seems
for fleeting instants sparkling in the haze of fog lifting—

the dread of the San Joaquin cloaking lowlands, where dark-gray
silhouettes of cattails once encircled swamps now drained
with ditches to furrows, gravity flow—with just a little rain.

Come awake blinking, heart and mind flicker together
within this ascension beyond the flesh to pagan possibilities
fit for the earth-bound, praying always for something fresh.

Almighty God is too busy with too many and too much
nowadays, not to let the ancient surrogates work the wild
and open territories to tame the natives with a little magic.

 

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PEGASUS

Posted on December 2, 2016 by | 2 comments

 

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Sometimes we ride high enough
to see the backs of eagles, bronze
wings tracing steep hillside oats

a glide. Even horses pause
to take notice. You can feel envy
rise beneath you, becoming one

another for a moment—prolonged
instants we crave, yet cannot hold
with minds a grip. But letting go

we float the thermals to Olympus
to bring back lightning, thunder—
with luck a poem and some rain.

 

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Posted in Photographs, Poems 2016, Ranch Journal

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BOVINE POETRY

Posted on November 30, 2016 by | Leave a comment

 

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The bulls are out among the cows
claiming territory high on ridges,
testing misty air with muffled bellows,
testing fences and plans on paper,
as usual—we respect their wishes,
broker treaties where we can
to get cows bred for next year.

Everybody wants the same thing:
full bellies, sex and freedom
without too much work or trouble.
Last week’s virgin bulls have slowed
to moan, learned names and calculate
grazing circles in open space to make
love richer with rhyme and assonance—

write the kind of lyrics fit for music
that brings herds closer as families
traveling together, saving energy
and time where tranquil matters more
than bragging rights or twisted politics
keeping pundits fully-employed
with slogans selling most everything.

 

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ANYMORE

Posted on November 28, 2016 by | 6 comments

 

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Too few days of rain to save for,
                                                          anymore:
the special jobs on the list of extras
when too wet to get to anywhere
off the road and you choose jelly
while it pours. The pomegranate tree
I pruned too much bore fruit
with volunteers now big enough
to finish filling gallon jugs with crimson
juice pressed from a jillion seeds
and saved in the freezer, now thawed
waits for sugar and that special
pectin brought to a boil to fill these jars
of translucence sealed to give away
to family and friends for Christmas.
Who saves these things for rainy days?

                                                     for Robbin

 

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FIRST WINTER STORM, 2016

Posted on November 27, 2016 by | 1 comment

 

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Wind bangs against the mountains,
cold on warm rips and tears
cracks in air as crooked fingers
touch the ground with ‘lectric
yellow light to spark a roar
upon the metal roof in panting
pulses beneath soft gray
as if the gods were making love
in a bass drum, small canyon room
upstairs spawning muddy rivulets
towards a dry creek bed between
wet sycamores undressing
long white limbs suggestively
spilling November tans and browns
upon the green to stand naked
before an eager flow gathering
rafts of clothes upstream—

or as angry as the 60s
marching to make love
instead of war, or vice versa—

or with the best intentions
for all we’ve done today,
come to wash the dirty laundry,
our tracks and waste away.

 

 

1.81″ @ 7:30 a.m.

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OUTCAST

Posted on November 26, 2016 by | 1 comment

 

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                                        Goodbye to this house and all its memories
                                        We just got too old to say we’re wrong.
                                             – Tom Rush (“Child’s Song”)

I follow your poem
to Google all the Tom Rush songs
my unaccompanied tongue could imitate—
turned gravelly since that 60s feeling
like an LA outcast, like an Indian
forced to die in a bluecoat army.

                    Nothing noble in Dakota,
                    the booms and busts
                    from Deadwood to the Bakken
                    claptrap towns on ground
                    that holds the gold
                    and light sweet crude—
                                        that make a man
                                        just want to run.

I gravitate towards native poetry,
mostly half-breeds now with hybrid-vigor,
steal the epigraph you borrowed
to seal the dreams we had in the bad times,
the loves and lust we clung to knowing
they were too good to last.

                                        after “Corrective Interlude” by Adrian Louis

 

 

“Child’s Song”

 

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AFTER THANKSGIVING

Posted on November 25, 2016 by | 6 comments

 

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I stumble out of an old dream panicked
about cattle I haven’t checked in months
on a hidden ranch I can’t place, connect
except they were not grazing vineyard rows
with no fences, not loose in town this time,
but on some hard-to-gather rolling ground
you can’t see from the pocked asphalt road
snaking through blond summer foothills.

Last time, they were OK, bull calves
too big to brand breeding sisters, but alive
on good feed and water. It may have been
the turkey dressing drenched in juices,
or the cranberries fermenting fear familiar
that I recognize more than this imagined place
to wait before saddling a horse, loading-up
asleep to tilt at impossible windmills.

I’ve been here before, rusty wire on redwood
posts askew, exploring canyons, finding old
rough-haired families too weak to be wild—
all the guilt and disappointment I need
to torture my subconscious. Too old for that,
I roll over to let my weak knees hang before
testing with a first step towards reality:
cigarette, coffee and a poem for Black Friday.

 

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