drycrikjournal

                                        i

They will be looking for yellow metal,
grease-stained men with steel shanks
and wide blades that friction with the earth
will shine like silver against her gentle slope.
In time, she will lay flat and lifeless, supine,
to be plowed and plowed until unrecognizable—
until she looks like town.
                                                             Meanwhile,
all the wild cattle, all the birds, all the native
ghosts know the way through the brush
to the ridgetops, and they will watch and shake
their heads once more in dismay—ever since
the Red Coyote came and felled an oak.

                                        ii

There will be talk of growing things,
roads and water, jobs and taxes,
prosperity for everyone—mitigation
and litigation to make it alright. Good
friends will forget how to listen
and judges will lean toward money
and votes, dreaming of sleeping
with the sketches of planners
                                                             where she used to be.

                                        iii

This is how we’ve tamed the West,
raping landscapes, extracting value.
We have learned nothing
                                                             over and over again
as we grow senseless, without feeling
for the ground that has fed us graciously—
busy felling oaks, redwoods,
and sycamores—busy filling towns.

                                                            And then
it was over, all the overlapping crescendos
of the latest news, a little bit left at each gate
beginning at the asphalt without a white line
widened, years back, when the gravel trucks
broke it up, raped the upstream channel, felled
sycamores born before Sir Francis Drake
claimed the California coast for Queen Elizabeth—
bleeding stumps of thick-trunked men and women
collapsed on their sides, no longer reaching out
to shade above and underground, high-graded
for the freshest alluvium and leaving an ugly,
150-acre pit in her breast, extracting her soul
before they went belly-up, the decade-old scar
haired-over now with willows and mule fat
like a generic, flat land creek.
                                                            April left
some of it with the horned bulls looking for bales
of alfalfa to rub off the truck, and by the second gate
her eyes fixed upon the creek and the colors
of Wood Ducks hustling their broods upstream.
She stopped in the crossing, listening to the rush
of water between her wheels as they disappeared
into the weeds along the bank.
                                                            By the third gate,
the rock face of Terminus Dam loomed
beyond the flat across the Kaweah canyon,
the only straight line this side of Blue Ridge
and the Great Divide, its control tower and space age
hydro plant and poles as the last attempt to train
and harness the whims of weather like a reliable
horse under the wildest of circumstances.
                                                            At Belle Point,
looking back over cattle grazing below,
looking back beyond the Kaweah’s riparian green
into the San Joaquin, orchard after orchard blurred
into busy, hazy towns as April closed the gate
behind her to climb the slope into the saddle
to look down into the lake, into Greasy Creek
turned Cove since the 60s, houseboats lashed
together into a raft of recovering partiers.
                                                            Across the canyon
on the switchback of the old CCC road, she
imagined men with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows,
mule drawn Fresno scrapers, and below, thin
evidence of the steep and overgrown homesteaders’
wagon track above Spoon Rock, narrow as a cowtrail
with some deer, does, caught out in the open, frozen
as April stopped to watch. Black dots of cows and calves
on the far ridge, and up ahead in the rock bluffs,
a coyote paused and disappeared into the granite’s blue
lupine before the fifth gate, heavy lifting off its rest, but
swinging easily into the Lower Field. April was home,
spooking a bobcat, then quail hurrying up the road.
The grass was tall and the world she left was gone.

                                                                              for Earl McKee

The heat thumps in your head
in short lines with long vowels
in Arizona,
                    mantras of pain
                    without rain
                    in July—

day after day deliriums,
ripe tomato red hallucinations
pulsing behind the eyes.

The flesh burns and blisters
in the light moving from shade
to shade to wait for darkness

when we can dream of dying—
any kind of ascension to beat the heat.

                                                            – for Amy

                                    i

The near-world of humans sleeps in,
no engines moan up the road early
on a summer Sabbath dawn, long
in the half-light pausing between
day heat and darkness, sky white
with the coming of the sun like
headlights over the rise of the Sierras,
buying time to inhale the morning
with their shadow, all that remains
to shield me now, parents gone.

                                    ii

These modern times of ease
and magic, of speed and gain—
prolonged instants complicated
with deceit and the juvenile in men
fall away, exfoliate like granite domes
a little everyday, as souls exposed,
storied landmarks from another time
that wait their turn to speak,
to whisper ways to shed it all
and breathe-in this hour’s peace.

                                    iii

God has abandoned this canyon,
left it on its own for early emergencies,
spread thin and stretched from steeple
to spire for quick apparitions
high in the shadows and stained
glass, glimpses of the light distorted
for the sure and self-righteous
in regimented towns. It is His cross
to bear, busy on the Sabbath
with the most basic flaw of all.

                                        i

In this dark moment, the East coast rolls
against old sheets, yawns and stretches
out of a million dreams at once, leaving

them to hang like ripe peaches for another
savoring—a great tree bent, limbs strained
with the weight of all that wishing. Yet

how many can be saved? The landscape
changes in a day with drought and hurricanes,
with once good men disguised in Washington

and we can’t seem to find our way back
to the orchard, to the tree before the fruit
falls and bruises, swarmed by feeding

gnats and yellow jackets as it decomposes.
If we could drive a stake, blaze a tree trunk,
leave bread crumbs and pray the pigeons

won’t consume our trail, the world
would be a better place—regularly revisiting
our secret fishing holes in peace.

                                        ii

When I was young I loved to hunt,
outthink the wild, read sign and project
trail’s end. I craved skirmishes with greedy

men, rebelled against almost anything
dishonest or unfair. But I am too old
for trouble now, weary of a game

to win, of chance or luck, of reaching
beyond mundane routines that offer
fleeting satisfaction, like a poem

tossed to the wind, like a mowed lawn,
mended fence or a freshly weeded garden
in the gloaming waiting for the dawn.

One of these days I will come back,
step down upon the peak of Sulphur Ridge
and let my feet slide upon the dry wild oats,

inhale their ripeness on my two-mile glide
to the creek and nap among the dark green
sycamores, be unseen in caves of shade.

Or should it be a rare November day
after a rain when it is gray and still, mist
clinging to the bare oaks on damp hills,

earthy perfume of wet dry grass in decay
that will bring seed to feed, that vital
beginning to every season annually.

Or Belle Point in the spring when I had you
captured in the pickup to look at cattle,
so proud of my colored cows standing

on the slope for big, long-eared calves.
The air is full of magic then towards the end
of March. We fell in love like April fools.

One of these days I will come back
like a rattlesnake, as the eyes and ears
of Tihpiknit waiting, deep in his dark den—

or a Canyon Wren calling, calling, calling
every wonder back to me. One of these days
I will come back for a poet’s guarantee.

Blame the bugs
on late spring rains—

clouds of leafhoppers,
grasshoppers in the house,

dawn’s flock of crows
on tall blond feed

armies of starlings
rising and lighting

in loose unison
to the gloaming—

but don’t dare complain
about late spring rains.