Category Archives: Poems 2018

                             Living on the road my friend,
                             Is gonna keep you free and clean
                                           Townes Van Zandt (“Poncho and Lefty”)

Early morning south of Bishop,
US 395 at seventy, murders
of crows or ravens like old men

gathered at the coffee shop
lift from a smear of hair
imbedded in the asphalt.

                  How the jack rabbit
                  laid his ears back,
                  found another gear!

The early birds get the night kill
living on and off the road.
O’ Darwin, how could you know?

Around me, wild shapes and sounds
alive—some begging rain, some
angling for continued dry—and I,

these old bones and softening flesh,
stand ready for the worst of it
as January green turns gray.

Beside sun-glint spirals, long chrome
lug nuts spinning, Mack truck rumbling
off Tehachapi into an exhaust cloud

trapped at the end of the San Joaquin,
we submerge like aquatic bugs
beneath the moss of a water trough

as we listen to the chattering news:
the muffled lines of script
for the multi-dramas beyond us.

We have been away and forgotten
what home looks like, what fence
beneath drought-killed oaks

needs attention first, which cows
most need hay—a murky purpose,
but we are ready for the worst of it.

I still remember
spring Sunday mornings
rustling covers and dreams awake—

“Great day,” he’d say,
“for the race,” emphatically—
as if we knew.

This cheery departure
for our father waving
at dawn streaming
from the Kaweah peaks
to mottled cottonwoods
along the river,
its glistening steam
rising into the light
had to be special.

“What race?”
I begged an answer.
“The human race,”
he’d say.

Tree and stone, earth and grass,
among them we must ask,
‘what is our place, what is our task?’

Stumblebums, we lack the bounding grace
of deer, the keening hawk, the tree limb
turned by wind and sun—we detract,

I fear, so out of touch, so out of step
in the earnest dance around us.
Stepping lightly as a boy in US Keds,

gun in hand, I left my marks for dead
that fed the buzzards trailing me
in thermal glide, for Red Tails watching

from the oak tops for the wounded,
for the cripples crawling desperately—
and I thought I’d found my place

where the wild could reason
and adapt to trust and think
enough of me to follow closely.

Riding the High Country as a boy,
I fished snowmelt lakes
beneath sharp peaks of scree,

found clarity around a fire,
played dot-to-dot with stars,
and dreamed on hard ground

that I’d awake unscathed,
but for my craving for space
beyond the hand of man.

A lifetime addiction,
betting on the weather
and a herd of cows grazing

foothills below, we wager
borrowed money, but don’t know
how to quit gambling

with the market and the politics
this close to heaven—we’ll
role the dice until we’re gone.

In our three score and ten,
we haven’t changed the world much—
though we marched for peace,

married and twice divorced
during continuous conflicts overseas,
over who knows what

philosophy it paid to exterminate. Now
it turns too fast for us and we retreat
like old bucks before the hunt.

                                             for JEG

Young ladies bathing beyond the cattails—
it could be the Nile or the Kaweah
pooling slowly in the summer heat

before the dams, before man began
to turn the earth around. We can’t
ignore the pesky fly in the ointment.

Beyond cell phone tethers
to the urgencies below,
we float beneath the clouds

with cattle in patched pens,
with the skeletons of oaks
stealing one last look

at old ways remembering
Effie Hilliard’s white horse
leading cows and calves,

her coywolves trailing,
through the gate to be
branded in these corrals.

A world above
she rode alone to leave
her ghost at peace.