drycrikjournal

The old oaks spoke patiently,
listening to each confusion
                    press for direction—
but I followed the churn
                    of rivers narrow
                    beyond the timber
                    in the granite
where the stars are many.

A man is almost nothing
                    in the mountains—
                    small creature
set apart in time for awe.

The other world of men
exfoliates and settles for
                    the clutch of gravity
and growth decomposing
                    in the bottoms—
                    here weather wears
                    the worn away
where the stars are many.

No need for money
                    in the mountains—
                    unless to start a fire
to keep the cold at bay.

Black silence beneath a waning moonrise:
a golden crescent, Venus trailing. Too hot
for night life, coyotes and raccoons are still

tossing in yesterday’s shade, rewriting
the same line half-a-dozen different ways—
a circular prowling they can’t get beyond

as the sun loops back into a blaze of day.
The night sky is ripe for gazing into the infinite
soul of the universe we can never see clearly,

for homemade theories stirred with myths
and illuminated meteors escaping somewhere—
for calming my delirium with blank paper.

A man steps out of the forest, a close family
of oaks in the shade of one another. Nothing
is as it was. Dry channels of rivers crumble

in a desert where green, ripe heads once bent
heavy with the breeze, in a lifetime’s flash
of time past and time to come—one moment

without beginning or end—a continual wash
of colors nevermore the same. The dull sacrilege
of leather-skinned mountain men felling the first

bountiful oak before native eyes bled into brown
forts that became settlements, before the gray
railroad towns and blond dry-land farming,

before the irrigated ground was planted to houses
surrounding bright cities run on more of the same.
And she gave-in and continued giving as she has

and will again, for time is nothing, just the passing
of a brush stroke on an endless panorama of ever-
changing colors that we are washed within.

The hoots in the dark grow closer
to sounding similar, a conversation
from ground to tree, a rustling of leaves.

Muffling a weak calf into the hollow
of my hand, she turns, looks back
and finds what she has hidden in the grass.

You nicker with him when he’s done well,
let gentle whinnies roll into your laughter.
Howling with coyotes since children,

we become them, feel each tone wash
through our flesh. You never forget
what the words mean, if you’re listening

—for sound and motion of the universal dance—
for the truth in heart and mind. When Mountain
Lion gathered the animals at Wuknaw,

at the head of Antelope Valley, each perched
in a circle of rocks that yet remain, they agreed
to create another creature to speak their tongue.

Either side of the Sierras, unpeopled shores of great lakes
when someone had to hold his breath, swim to the bottom
mud and bring the fine and putrefying ooze up to shape
humans. Helldiver or turtle, not far from scientific truth.

Nothing in a myth is exact, nor among the grasses
where Blue Jay plants oak trees randomly. The First
Ones lived with changing luck, knew the language
of the animals, took what they needed and wasted nothing

but time. The moon came and went. A marvel rising
within the oak limbs, within the flesh! celebrated
by everyone. Here the women came to watch her
form asleep, breathing atop the mountains, a golden

pendant rising from her breast. A sure revisiting,
the animals still hold their breaths, gather and await
new songs and stories of the hundred and fifty years
they’ve been away, wandering, wondering, why.

We move towards fall, the sun yet high and blistering—
like cattle shade to shade, if we move at all—a time
to ruminate and write, to irrigate the roots in half-light,

and measure the blush of fruit surging on the vine.
The good and evil of this world have no perfect borders,
no kings or queens on this clod to rule the weeds and pests,

to banish the sycophants, all come to celebrate the harvest.
And for a moment in the mind, a gardener can become a god
to plot his Eden, and find pleasure in his small Genesis

that cooks beneath the sun in good earth and water.
This is the wellspring of all men’s dreams that now
they have forsaken, the sun yet high and blistering.

                                                                       —as we part
                                     the foam that wind scatters,
                                     and leave our footprints behind
                                     to fill with brine and disappear.
                                               – Quinton Duval (“Valentine”)

Somewhere on the beach we leave ourselves.
Even our claw marks in the mountain’s rock
fade with time as traces only we remember

as important. The coast is clear as Sierra skies
after a storm. The slate is clean, interrupted only
by a passenger jet, its red contrail waning.

I remind myself to make each moment rich,
moving slowly to see more than the end
of an accomplished life. Forget the colorful

opinions clinging to the limbs of trees,
forget the political cacophony as just another
man’s pastime. Come walk a ways with me.