
Too bright to sleep
or wrestle with dreams
with a full Sturgeon hole
rising from the ridgeline
into the night sky
like a gigantic galactic leak
upon us, for all the UFOs
and UAPs to pass through,
for all the excuses we need
to behave like lunatics.

runs over boulders,
spills and spumes
into deep green pools
or into cutbanks
exposing roots
hiding rainbow trout
beneath a dogwood’s
white blooming
I can’t let go.
Overgrown, no room
for a kid to cast
a deer hair fly—
fresh flow of time
behind me now
I go there yet
without thinking,
without yearning,
with nothing more
than feeling
the untamed current
still run through me.

Talking bombs,
fast-draw uranium enriched
nuclear bullets, missiles aimed
at predetermined targets—
like the enemy’s essentials:
water, electric
and transportation grid
poisoned and petrified—
and who’s got the best,
them or us? Fighter jets
or drones, B-2s
or attack subs,
who can blow the biggest hole
in the planet? Who can drive
the herd of humans
over the cliff of reason first
into the flames
of Armageddon,
barbecued and
swallowed whole.
Dawn near the Solstice, shadows
seem to shrink in the same places
on the hillsides where cattle graze
towards midday shade, oblivious
to the hackneyed news of war
‘to end all wars’ my whole lifetime
promising everlasting peace—
one way or another now
on the cusp of my reward.
Pale ribbon of dawn—
war fears rise
as somewhere east of here
helter-skelter backroom maneuvers
make knights of pawns.
One more war to end all wars
hangs in the heavens—
one more barren planet
to explore
when your work is done.
Perhaps a better day awaits,
a better way to stifle the narcissistic
egos bent on power, born of greed.
But it must trickle to truly flourish
from the bare ground up.
Blessed are the meek
for they shall inherit the earth.
– Matthew 5.5
Posted in Poems 2025, poetry
Tagged Beatitudes, Jonathon Swift, meek, poetry, trickle down, trickle up, war

Summer heat intense enough
to forget the rainy days beyond
the blinding sheets of delirium
framed in flames. The trickle
of the creek shrinks each day
as young cows bring calves down
to shade and well-water
before we gather to wean—
first-calvers looking for relief,
yearning for those days of virginity,
of curious discovery free
from bovine responsibilities.
Never in this world the same,
yet no better mother than a cow—
Happy Mother’s Day!
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2025, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged cow, Mother's Day, photography, poetry, weather
Posted in Haiku 2025, Photographs, Poems 2025, poetry, Ranch Journal, Wildlfowers
Tagged Rock Monkeyflower

Like fighter jets after hawks,
they nose dive the dog,
attack from redwood boughs
to protect a fledgling
too soon on the ground.
A community, a murder, a grind,
a merle or murmuration
of blackbirds has moved-in,
displaced the finches’
crimson dance upon the rail
with cocky walks and orgies
of foreplay and flittering sex
anywhere they please—but ready
to herd a rattlesnake
out of the garden and barnyard.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2025, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged Brewer's Blackbird, collective nouns, Dry Creek, photography, poetry