April calves load easy here
for unknown destinations
looking back to say goodbye
to someone lost
in the muddled moment’s
brain fog.
Old between brothers,
we remember stories
the other’s forgot—
a thrill on spry legs
to dance through time
as if young all over again.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023, poetry
Called too soon, persistence rooted
where peaceful dreams beneath their leaves
spilled downhill at dawn—a slow awakening
like death in reverse, never thinking
of other ways to pass the time. Weathered
skeletons of young Blue Oaks cling
to where their acorns fell to rest
before the wet and stormy springs
kept a chance of an idyllic life alive.
Truth is: no right or wrong of it—
no philosophy to make fit
what we’ll not need to understand.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023
Tagged Acorns, Blue Oaks, death, death in reverse, Drought, life, photography, poetry, rain, water, weather
Black backs
through summer light
across the road beside the creek
grazing green
upon a highwater sand bank
deposited by atmospheric rivers.
Black backs
of virgin children, our future
breathes in 105 heat.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged Dry Creek, future, photography, poetry, rain, Replacement Heifers, weather
It’s a dirty trick
not to bring ‘hello hay’
by flake or bale,
to show empty-handed
with a cluttered mind
from another world.
If I had the time
I’d stay the day among them,
forget myself
and lie down and learn
to chew my cud
without thinking.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023, poetry
Tagged another world, cows, cuds, photography, poetry, sentient, time
One by one off trucks,
hooked or boomed into the barn
banked for the unknown.
Sweaty, sleeveless shirt, Dusty
Bohannon, until he died, unloaded
thousands of bob-tailed trucks
before the booms pitched bales inside,
before the squeezes stacked dumps up
for unknown winter times
like grounded vermin store
in tunneled chambers, or cackling birds
in fenceposts pecked with holes.
Posted in Haiku 2023, Photographs, POEMS 2023, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged Acorns, Drought, photography, poetry, rain, weather, winter
The magic remains along the creek
spread wide with naked cobbles pressed
together, exposed by flooding sheets
that ripped its sandy banks before
leaving the channel changed—
a landscape rearranged for the moment!
A summer gurgle, herons and egrets come
to wade abandoned pools of pollywogs
shrinking into moss-covered gravel.
Green cockleburs rise-up from ribbons
of sand, high-water veins bleached white
until colored or carried away with the burrs.
The truth is endless here—it will keep
saying the same thing in different ways
well after we are gone.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged Atmospheric Rivers, cobbles, cockleburs, photography, poetry, rain, truth, water, weather
Third day wean
when hungry heifers
eat out of my hands
at the feed bunk—
leafy alfalfa flakes
that fall apart, the rich
green of last year’s
high-dollar hay—
rather than distress
over mothers no longer
posted at the gate
that most have left
lamenting another loss
of nine-month intimacy
and their mother-daughter
companionship.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023, Ranch Journal
Tagged 2023 heifers, bovine intimacies, innocence, photography, poetry, stress, weaning
Ever so gentle, these waves of wild oats—
easy undulations into the wide swath
of bright-yellow White Mustard
in the disturbed ground
where we fed bulls
drought after drought.
If ever I could reinvent myself
as easily with storm after storm,
shake the slow walk and run
with breath aplenty, mind sharp.
Hazy days of snapshots flashing
uninvited or young among old men
now gone in the photograph
of the branding crew Rochelle took
when Craig was still alive
hanging on the bathroom wall
with south slopes of pure gold,
wet spring after the Drought of 1977.
Ever so gentle, these waves of memory,
stories only searching names,
ever so gentle, they come to me.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged age, branding crew, Drought, Drought of '77, flashbacks, Holland Corrals, memories, photographs, photography, poetry, rain
No spring chicken, she’s let herself go
wild after a decade of waterless summers
as if saving up the emptiness to fill at once—
every wrinkle in these hills oozing rivulets
into foaming cappuccino creeks cresting
towards runaway rivers spilling, flooding
valley towns and farm ground with lakes
and bogs—all the years of prayers answered
with much more passion than we wanted.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged Drought, flood, Mother Nature, photography, poetry, PRAYERS, rain, weather
Too many years courting goddesses,
genuflecting at the foot of ridgetops:
oak trees sharp and close enough to touch
to beg relief—to even entertain
such shameful blasphemy, such
feeble will to forever lose their ear.
Every river canyon churns to fill
and spill its reservoirs, white-capped
Sierras stacked with two-year’s snowpack
awaiting summer’s melt to flood the flats
and yet I can’t concede what is not me:
always ready, waiting for a good-hard rain.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged dams, flood, photography, poetry, prayer, rain, rain goddess, rivers, snow, weather
drycrikjournal 