Category Archives: Poems 2019

It could be heaven
if the girls across the canyon
cared, if they worried

about the time of day
or year when green
turns straw-blond dry.

They are spared
the human condition—
graze until they die.

                                                                                What will you do? She asks. I will
                               continue north, carry the past in my arms, flying into winter.
                                                  – Jack Gilbert (“BRING IN THE GODS”)

Might we say

we leave the past on the page,
chapbooks bundled in our arms
heading north into the storm—

                    time-faded faces,
                    moments tagged
                    into poems.

We know their names
and cherish visions
with vibrant clarity

like a bell chiming
on a wind gusting
across the canyon

of time behind us.
Three score and ten
more, I am reluctant

                    to let go
                    of this life
                    in exchange

for something more
like fulfillment
everlasting.

When Zinfandel heavens part between rains,
we lift a glass of Cabernet at dusk
towards their fleeting magnificence

before the storm, beyond our reach
or responsibility, helpless but to bask
in the fading light of certain truth.

                                        nothing left but a river flowing on the borders of heaven.
                                              – Li Po (“On Yellow-Crane Tower, Farewell to                                                            Meng Hao-jan Who’s Leaving for Yang-chou”)

Branding big calves an hour from the asphalt,
snow-laden Sierras dressed in diaphanous clouds
a stone’s throw across the North Fork canyon

from these corrals too short for modern cows,
we talk about the pressure-treated posts you set
six foot down back when I can’t remember.

Away from the world for years, you are both here
and beyond the Great Western Divide,
a fuzzy white river flowing south to somewhere.

                                                                  for Gary Davis

Purple clouds up canyon,
an armada approaching
white skies at dawn…

battleships burning pink,
fleet afire and fading
into a bluer sea.

Burning twin Valley Oaks
gone dead in the drought,
undermined by the creek—

four-foot trunks
of smoking coals
two or three centuries old

stirred with the skid steer
three times a day
religiously

have left a hole
in my tangled world
across the creek

I cannot replace:
timelessness trapped
in mottled shadows

embracing me
each time I passed
beneath them.

* Really “DAY THREE”, (today is Saturday, not Sunday). Excused from Jury Duty, I lit the fire Thursday morning after Erik Avila pulled the trees out of the creek with an excavator for Kaweah Delta Water Conservation District on Wednesday.

The ranchy part of this common confusion for us is that we’re busy, we work at something everyday, doing pretty much what we want—no “hump days” with weekdays and weekends pretty much the same, we tend to lose track of what the name of today is. That’s my story and I’m stickin to it.