drycrikjournal

A house, a short-way up the road
on the canyon’s curve, looks abandoned
but it is warm and comfortable inside

where I head afoot, noticing sign.
Around the bend, some kind of vehicle
is crunched into a rock pile,

upside down, broken glass—I look
for life but there is no one, dead or alive.
I look inside the house for a dent

in the couch, a butt in the ashtray,
then relax to contemplate
what I don’t understand.

I hear voices out back and see three
young men reclined around a rocked-in
fire for cooking. The yard is immaculate

without debris of weeds and leaves
as they look up to greet me, offering
the best they have, when I wake up.

Flashing red lights scream upcanyon,
set dogs and coyotes howling,
startle cattle and the horses to look

afraid of what we don’t know. Road
too narrow for the eyes of tourists
to leave, too many curves for speeding

motorcycles, too many steep places
to meet a tour bus or a neighbor
hauling cattle, or someone with

too much to drink—we never know.
But back slow and easy, the ambulance
was either not needed, or just too late.

                                                            for Linda Hussa

1.

Back when energy was cheap,
we lit smudgepots—ten cents/gallon
to keep from freezing an orange crop.

Manpower, six-bits/hour—fifty-five
hour-weeks bent to wooden handles
shoveling, hoeing weeks, or harnessing

a Cornbinder’s horsepower
when damn-near any Mom and Pop
could make a dollar from the earth

farming—a young man horseback
could ride all-day for almost free
and old cowboys worked for nothing.

 
2.

We had lots of energy in the old days,
lots of hands we can’t afford
to hire anymore, water going deeper

and pump bills higher, we suck
the planet dry for expensive things
we never used to need

when energy was cheap.
With the sun on my face
and wind at my back,

I thought I would last forever
like the Eveready Bunny—
back when energy was cheap.

                        Antistrophe of desolation to the strophe multitude.
                                    – Robinson Jeffers (“Still the Mind Smiles”)

Either by design or to assuage the monotony of heaven,
the gods decide the course of storms to start the play,
set a season’s stage in motion with the belly-crawl
of bugs and snakes, those players closest to the earth.

Most of the birds wait in the wings—a finch flits
in the roof beams, a lone Killdeer surveys the sand
along a receding creek, movement without dialogue
or song, a slow and solitary dance unfolds

to envelop us, the audience, and we are helpless.
On the other side of the mountain, the river will not
run long enough to feed the ridiculous, the excesses
of the madding throng. Two opposing worlds exist

and the gods sit balanced on the ridges between
extremes. But it is the nature of cows to graze
the flats rather than the steep. Only a few
will forsake the bunch until the grass grows short.

I thumb through the American Poetry Review
looking for a poet to like, scanning newsprint
for shape and size, open space, shorter lines—

for that brave twist of perception that strums
a new chord, but most of my contemporaries
are busy with how they imagine the details

ought to be, or try to shock me with profanity
I used loosely at seven not knowing why.
But there’s always one or two to focus on

and big ads for MFA programs, poets-
in-residence I never heard of, faculty
just like me, learning how to write.

But a poet arrives when listed as visiting—
the name that draws tuition for a stipend
like lecture tours for retired politicians,

but far more inspiring. This is the end
of the rainbow in a great poet’s life,
shuffling words to a roomful facing fame

before it slumps at its desk, or luckier
to wander off into demented landscapes
to suppose it penned its own prize.

                        And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in the love of man,
                            a clever servant, insufferable master.
                        There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—
                            they say—God, when he walked on earth.
                                          – Robinson Jeffers (“Shine, Perishing Republic”)

How yet we cycle back to see the love of man bloom,
time and again, trapped on this planet spinning in space
with all its wars and ricochets, its plagues and tragedies—
that wonderful yearning to please like good dogs!

How the angels must envy us and sigh, especially in spring.
They have escaped and hate their detachment, cannot feel
rivers run through flesh, and they will suffer everlasting
life without needs, without winter’s frozen ground.

What clever genius, I suppose, to repopulate our space
to crowd us inward, to speculate in safe repose
and say, write poetry or paint a rose to give away—
time and again, trapped on this planet spinning in space.

We think of them with each lesson learned—
never too old until we decompose like they have
to reach from branches, look down from ridges.
We are a pagan lot, especially at brandings

when the sap runs uphill to flower and bloom,
color aspirations and more urgent dreams. They
remember how it was with dramas of weather
that with the local gossip could cost a ranch.

Not much has changed but the time frame,
our subterfuge of concurrent diversions
ricocheting, end over end, whining into space
from the rockpiles we’re huddled within—

that black and white Western transformed
in living color, high-definition details
that could still kill us—they are grinning
and amused—we are the entertainment now,

dodging bullets, digging deeper in the ground
that becomes our flesh, that becomes them—
just dirt dependent on whims of the weather.
And that’s the funny part—in the end.