drycrikjournal

As hot as I can stand,
elbows propped on squeaky knees,
morning showers stream my back
to penetrate and loosen the grip
of the great white cloud
claiming my spine
complaining before day begins.

I was not raised the easy way
of spendthrifts in town, learned
the value of a dollar an hour
shoveling the 1942 flathead Ford
dump truck full of loose red clay
to keep us busy between
moving sprinkler pipes
morning and night, all summer
on the 120 acres of green pasture
for weaned calves—we only dreamed
of machinery, of men on backhoes
my father didn’t need to pay
ten bucks when he had us.
All that character dumped
in a hole that needed dirt.

Twenty years my senior,
resting between bunches
of soggy A.I. calves
watching sons and wives,
grandsons and their wives,
reload vaccine guns, stoke
the fire and sharpen knives
as his great-grandkids hang
from the fence outside the pen,
he rises to tell me something funny—
                     just how happy
                     he is to be alive.

                                      for Frank Ainley

                         they looked out over the earth,
                         and the north wind felt like the truth.
                                    -William Stafford (“Our People”)

We ride under the circling killdeer
cry, almost always looking upstream first—
to the north of where we are
and what comes from the sky.

Beneath the current, a rock and cobble
bottom that horses can’t always see—
they feel their way, stub toes
trusting, splashing in the spring.

Where sand meets the gravel,
wounded killdeer dance and cry
emphatically, turn brown feathers out
to drag upon the ground.

We pair them up like cattle
and search for speckled eggs,
always glancing to the north
to feel what’s coming our way.

We can’t help but dream
of what we don’t have:
light at night, darkness
at the end of days.

What genius to know that
we’ll never escape
ourselves, what just reward
to keep coming back

to live in what’s leftover.
It doesn’t hurt to invest
time in a nest, to create
space for the soul—

offer something for the gods
to hang on their wall.
We can’t help but dream
of what we can’t control.

The trial is almost over, the attorneys have argued
philosophy instead of law, each holding to ideals
we can never quite attain in this life. A jury

would be worthless. You have no money to pay
mileage or per diem anyway. You have listened
to all of the extenuating circumstances

and must measure the clarity attained since
the beginning, whether tortoise or hare,
neither speed nor time are factors anymore.

Did the distance come easy, did you not feel
Dante’s sins set-up camp beneath your skin,
were you immune and not succumb to learning

the hard way—not learn a thing? Out here
there are few secrets left, no place to hide—no
commotion or combustion cloud to float within.

Of chance, of luck, of all the signs,
we teeter near disaster despite the odds—
and we enhance them chasing passion
like butterflies, like all good humans.

Always the ambush, I have lain in wait
for quail, for the illusive young buck,
for greenheads circling beneath gray fog
and forgot to fire or decided not

to disturb such grace, to pick and pluck.
What is it then we hunger for
more than living, or giving life
another chance to sweep us up?

                                              for Amanda

Humbled by time upon this ground
beneath these skies—these stars aligned
with eternity and the moon’s rise,

by whatever sets events of chance
in motion, that chain reaction
lucky stumblebums know is beyond

their doing or direction—we have been
chosen to survive, to learn our lessons
before we decompose and start over again

as something less complex, yearning only
for the sun and rain. A man can
start early, revel in the weather, dance

among goddesses and hobgoblins alike,
knowing nothing will stay the same
beneath this ball of firelight.

They propose life on other planets,
in other galaxies, that learn in the same
way—some confined to immortal lives.