There is a knack to stacking wood
and wrapping packages in brown paper
you learn with time.
A metal pail for White King D
saved for picking blackberries
beyond the clothes line.
A drawer-full of safety pins,
balls of string with rubber bands
and paper clips held us together
in emergencies. She survived
the Spanish Flu of 1918
birthing my father, youngest daughter
of an Edinburgh schoolmaster,
arrived in Fresno to teach the Indians
English—and me the poetry of Keats.
Strobe flash in time, all the big
plans for man shelved in the pantry
to be replaced by figures in white
with spray guns and hoses, back-packs
leaking disinfectant, sweeping vermin
from city streets and houses.
Orwell,
Burroughs,
Wells and
Heinlein
Crop dusters out of mothballs. We see ourselves
on huge screens, ever-watched and judged
by new rulers with clean hands in latex gloves
sipping nectar and ambrosia behind the veil of Oz.
Even the old duffers will learn to march in line
or hide like wild game, escape to the underground
tunnel leading to a sunlit, pastoral nirvana
that makes a living in nearly everyone’s mind.
New plane and playing field, we will learn to live
within ourselves without touching flesh-to-flesh,
without feeling the prolonged kiss that wanders
and explores new territory of an uncertain future.
Gasoline makes game scarce.
– William Stafford (“From the Move to California”)
A honk in the dark under clouds,
a lost goose circles the canyon’s walls
as it listens for an answer,
as I listen to the creek
rush instead of gurgle
since the rain.
Turkeys gobble over the rise
I cannot see, pausing like tree frogs
to join the chorus.
Not a car on the road
with headlights dancing
between posts and barbed wire—
there are no bounds to the black,
no interruption to the sounds
approaching normal
as if we and our machines
have abandoned this canyon
to its own devices.
Orange Harvest Mural by Colleen Michell-Veyna—Exeter, CA
1.
The valley sinks with pumping
deeper and deeper
into investor’s pockets
before they take the write-off,
before they turn the ground
for a profit.
It’s a clean deal
with no hands dirty.
2.
We are the immigrants
from another time
growing closer to the soil,
dreaming still of rain, bumper crops
and markets high enough
to pay the bank off—
mom and pops
who stay the ground.
3.
The natives heard them coming,
saw the woodsmoke,
left rabbits on the doorstep
to keep the guns inside—
to not spook the game
that fed them before
the tule elk and
antelope were gone.
Mid-afternoon, after-rain beneath cottony cumulus
with sails set north trailing the long-awaited storm,
a lone coyote’s husky bark, cows and calves
across the creek frozen alertly upon the green—
I must assume the feral pigs now have had their fill
of the young bull I had to kill two weeks ago
with broken leg sunk deep into a squirrel hole
while sparring with his mates passing idle time
with unemployed testosterone awaiting the long,
hog-truck trip home to a feedlot in Idaho.
Stiff hide and disconnected bones don’t care
having filled the bellies of our sanitary engineers.
Reading this, you
have survived the wars
by wit or luck
to suffer more.
It is our nature
to endure
when nothing,
that eternal dark emptiness,
remains the same—
when nothing
escapes change.
Inside my rabbit hole:
last spring’s late rains
brought pneumonia
killing quail chicks
while turkeys thrived
and multiplied.
This spring dry
beneath mostly
empty clouds,
a carpet of golden
fiddleneck
beneath hard hills
turned brown.
Beyond my hide-away:
a scuffling of men
(and women, too)
changing places in line—
some running for election,
some running for cover,
some running in fear
to empty shelves
to stay alive.
It is our nature to endure.
She didn’t stay long
or leave much in the way
of puddles,
her fine gray mist
to brighten green,
settle dust
and relieve the pain
of waiting
for a well-begged rain—
a sniff and taste
to lure us closer
toward our reward
like this cold dawn’s
chimney smoke,
flat to the ground,
drawn up-canyon
following her
discarded clouds.
February 23, 2020
0.15″
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2020, Ranch Journal
Tagged photography, poetry, rain, weather
Alone in the dark
that shrouds anemic green
and short-stemmed fiddleneck
thinking February seed,
the joyful gurgle
of a shrinking creek
gulps over cobbles
to sit beside me
on a cold and moist
down-canyon breeze.
Painted black,
all sounds normal
as if a sign.
Alone in the dark
I color hillsides leaking
beneath gray skies.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2020, Ranch Journal
A single pod of seeds, the bare
redbud volunteer, come spring,
will obscure my view of the road;
the world beyond this black morning—
beyond the owl in the oaks above me;
the cobbled mumbles of the creek.
With the hillside chorus of coyotes
and canyon’s replies, the ridgeline
holds-up heaven’s brilliance
in a sky of stars—unabashed
and unafraid of any circumstance
that may engulf us all.
Another cold dry front
rests upon the tops of hills,
shapeless clouds, a haze
upon steep south slopes,
red clay like brick—
green pales to gray
as we brand calves
one by one
we may sell early
with their mothers.
I brace against the familiar
drama, growing numb
as my stiff new rope
slides through the palm
of time’s softened hand,
warming as it searches
for my frayed
wrapped-cotton horn.
I quote my elders
dead and gone
as they visit
the branding pen.
Don’t worry, Dofflemyer,
E. J.’d say.
It’s gonna rain.
It takes years to get here
with cows we like—
unwritten contracts
they understand
as we discuss
our options
of who goes first
and who gets what’s left
of hay.
Of the two of us,
I am the dreamer
and believer—
a luxury
you have allowed me
facing facts
as I grow gray.
for Robbin
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2020, Ranch Journal
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