drycrikjournal

The old girls know before we go, read
our minds, movement and the stars aligned
this time of year when they’ve given up their calves,
ready for home and breeze beneath the Buckeye shade
and cool dirt stirred by generations—something sure.

If you turned them loose they’d find their way,
but they’d rather graze than climb the hill
the young girls question, working edges, lingering
while feigning naiveté, looking off towards memory
and possibility other than a season with matrons

without patience. No one really tries the horses
who know their way around the rock pockets,
down trees and steepness, daring independence
with their eye and sidehill two-step. The bunch
lines out, everyone having fun headed home.

Swamp coolers all we had, we ran around half-naked
as kids in summers over a hundred, men and women
worked the fields in broad-brimmed hats, burlapped

gallon jugs at the end of each row. Sunscreen from
March to November, I’m wearing down, can’t take the sun
as I wait under a crescent moon above the undulating

ridgeline, our supine maiden sleeping, for enough light
to get the day started, load of hay ready in the dark.
It’s all planned now: catch a horse, feed the calves,

change irrigation water, then back to saddle and leave
to sort the calves from cows and haul them down the hill
to feeders full of alfalfa to weigh, worm and wean.

Dust from a hundred years of cows will boil up
from the old corrals, bandana bandits going slowly,
tip-toeing horseback so we can all breathe easier.

We were drawn as children to enclosures
like calves to the comfort of fallen limbs—
our dark bat and board sheds and barns

long without paint, dry wood curling
at the rough-cut edges leaked splintered
dust beams, enough to add chapters

to our adventures. We would visit town
friends on horse-drawn implements
saved just in case like old farmers do, play

doctor, lawyer, merchant and Indian chief
or build forts of walnut leaves in the fall,
dig foxholes with Army Surplus shovels

to shoot the Japs and Jerries, then die
dramatically upon the bulwarks, only
to rise again as if sowed by serpent’s teeth.

You remember that she was kind
it seemed beyond herself—beyond
all other wanting of this world

of angles and leverage. Her face
has no name, no one moment
saved to hang upon the walls

we pass by and would ignore
if she did not surround us all—
so infectious, she tends to feed

and please herself without trying,
her tongue upon a suckling calf
or kitten. Her open smile

and eyes in a thousand faces
you have always envied,
that touch you still, that fill

a pause prolonged for a life
and you remember her
for she was that kind.