Category Archives: Ranch Journal

Innocent enough: the service pole
holding two hundred and twenty volts
above the ground to the house,
end of the line for electric power
and all its surges, to be replaced
by men and three huge trucks
with hydraulic arms and augers.
That’s how comedies begin
in backyard pastures too dry to irrigate,
visits by servicemen scouting work orders,
asking if the dog bites: “Sometimes.”
The faucet crushed beneath a tire
while we were gone to Bakersfield
trading goosenecks before we wean—
the white geyser and phone call
asking where to turn the water off:
“The pump.” On, after an easy faucet fix
at dusk, but no water to the house,
you found the gate valve stripped,
one last twist that did not quell
the fountain wasting in a drought
with the gopher snake they killed.
Innocence, fear, the tracks were clear.
We cut and plumbed another gate valve,
used once and saved like farmers do,
you and I and the mosquitoes
on our bellies in the mud with wrenches
after the inch-and-a-half Dayton blew
three times under pressure. Face-to-face,
a wrench apiece, the coupler between us
the fourth time tightened to hold
forever in my mind, our wet and muddy
partnership, laughing: “Welcome home.”

I think no more or less of you
than when you lived
alone hoarding memories,

long life collecting guns
and knives in the Berkeley hills.
Only with plastic yellow ribbon

stretched across Tanglewood
can we share a last laugh:
bomb squad extricating

your volatile black powder,
old ammunition and grenades
from the backyard bunker,

neighbors at windows, and you
gleefully grinning down upon
the commotion you’ve stirred.

Stanford, Harvard law, Bohemian
Club, without issue you enjoyed
the luxury of eccentricities

far from your mother’s dirt—
or her father’s, the Judge
in the barn with his jug.

All we really wanted
were the stories, first cousins
once removed in life and death.