Category Archives: Ranch Journal

Following an old hill track within dry
grasses and trees, dust worn thin,
soft and deep by pad and hoof,

dark shadows reach for shades of brown.
Once blond heads of wild oats bent
by breezes, now bleached by the sun,

hang empty and delicate on hollow stems
awaiting grazing or a rain to lay them down
atop the rosy clutch of fillaree

claiming ground in brittle curls beneath.
Blue Oaks gray with turquoise leaves,
leather-like among the naked skeletons

of grandfathers shedding limbs, lesions
of good hardwood, too heavy to support
without water on these battlefields,

the wounded and dead-standing, but
decomposing monuments to better centuries—
a range of color spreading into dying light.