Category Archives: poetry

CLASS OF 2023

Posted on August 5, 2023 by | Leave a comment

 

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.

 

 

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IN THE COMPANY OF COWS

Posted on July 15, 2023 by | 2 comments

 

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.

 

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ACORNS

Posted on July 12, 2023 by | Leave a comment

   

            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.

 

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Posted in Haiku 2023, Photographs, POEMS 2023, poetry, Ranch Journal

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AFTER ATMOSPHERIC RIVERS

Posted on July 11, 2023 by | 7 comments

 

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.

 

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THEY COME TO ME (aka “WILD OATS”)

Posted on April 16, 2023 by | 8 comments
Top: Jim Wells, Leroy Whitney, Scott Erickson. Middle: Jack Erickson, Kyle Loveall, Gary Davis, Jr., Forrest Homer, Mehrten Homer, E. J. Britten, Earl McKee, Jr. Bottom: Clarence Holdbrooks, John Dofflemyer, Craig Thorn III.

 

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.

 

 

 

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WINTER PASSION

Posted on March 30, 2023 by | 4 comments

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

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INTRINSIC HABIT

Posted on March 29, 2023 by | 2 comments

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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OUR SHORT MOMENT

Posted on March 27, 2023 by | 5 comments

 

 

We have left our mark on this ground:

the house, the pipe, the horses,

cattle, shop and barn—and the avenues

 

between them—that were not here

forty years ago where the deer lay down

beside the road. Our tracks everywhere

 

we worked details into grazing hillsides

and raising calves you’ll never see

before they are erased by time’s storms

 

and someone else’s appetites and dreams.

Our short moment among the mortar holes

and pictographs that will outlive our presence.

 

 

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FLOODWATER

Posted on March 15, 2023 by | 1 comment

 

The creek-flood bears no malice

as it carves its way to a flatland war

unearthing trees and buried cobbles

 

of past centuries—laying waste

to man’s old and new improvements.

It cares no more than the clouds and rain

 

that feed its energy, its violence

and its thunderous roar.  Nor does it

bestow charity to soothe our minds

 

and flesh—it has no agenda, no noble

purpose nor dishonorable motives.

It just is what it always has been.

 

 

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THE GRAY DAYS

Posted on March 14, 2023 by | 2 comments

 

Every day is a holiday

when you can’t remember

what day it is—

 

when you can’t leave the driveway,

can’t leave the blacktop,

when it’s too wet to plow

 

for weeks at a time

as the creek rises and falls

with Atmospheric Rivers.

 

The finches bring branches

of dry debris, Roadrunners

chaunt solicitous love songs

 

despite the divine disasters

that temper mortal urgencies

a week away from the Equinox.

 

 

 

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