drycrikjournal

Part of a day’s gather escapes
through a gate left unlatched
and we discuss signage,
phrasing neighborly verbiage
through clenched teeth
that will necessitate
a billboard to incorporate—
all the reasons why
they’re open or closed
when everyone should know:

           LEAVE GATES
LIKE YOU FIND THEM

      or find another way
to get where you’re going.

                                        In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan
                                        and mountains of the Mexican border
                                        I’ve followed the calls of birds
                                        that don’t exist into thickets
                                        and up canyons. I’m unsure
                                        if all of me returned.
                                                            – Jim Harrison (“Suite of Unreason”)

I
At a flatland fundraiser,
a young man remembers stories

                    of his father and I
                    that never happened—

revels in his glass
embellishments streaming
like dismembered parchment,

                    piecing the unfurled
                    fragments from other scrolls
                    that float in his mind

as heroic ideals to aspire to.

II
Each time
we ride above the lake to gather,
we look down as horses blow
to trace where the Kaweah ran
beneath it,

point to familiar family names
living along the river before its wide,
slow turn into sand flats hemmed
with cattails around the mouth
of Greasy Creek, before the big holes
of rock and water under the earthen dam
where natives swam, spearing huge carp
to dry and haul up Dry Creek to Eshom
in a cart, Loren, as a boy, riding upon them
and why he never learned to swim.

Each time,
what we remember of the river rises
as if they never left.

III
I do not crave to travel, to leave
these places, or make new history
elsewhere—with tracks enough

chasing bird songs here at home,
always with the hope that storms
will wash deep ruts from memory.

Everyday an adventure, playing
with coincidence, watching
arbitrary time light upon a branch—

each small part of me I leave behind
like ash and dust you’ll never see
is a lifetime spread over acres of ranch.

Another morning, another
dawn between dark ridges
rising to starlight—the same

hurdles for the celestial
to overcome as cattle wake
to another day of grazing

without the urgent grip
of each second’s tick
counted against them.

They want no holiday,
no vacation—they have
no fear of death.

So many years of envy
and respect, we begin
to think like them.

                    Until yesterday,

I’ve never seen a Spotted Towhee,
                    a jumpy pair
                    kicking old and moldy leaves.

A Black Phoebe watched
                    this foreign intensity
                    closely from a chair.

Could it be a sign of something
                    other than plenty of bugs
                    on the ground and in the air?

The rise and fall of gods that have danced
among the alabaster pillars of men’s brains,
playing hide and seek upon a marbled floor—

                    an ever-changing Maxfield Parrish scene
                    apart from dark-eyed Greed and Power skulking
                    in the shadows either side of the garden,

begins in delightful innocence. We lowered
our shoulders to the wagon, men and boys,
to get the harvest in, leaned with the grace

of a team of mules in the narrow vine rows.
And we were proud, young bulls to work
as one before the dance of efficiency,

before the purring explosions of machinery,
before production stole that sweet satisfaction
from our common soul. There was no call

for ordinary men, nor need for common
sensibilities—we were unemployed and fed
to the faceless storm of another urgency.

Age may bring heavy burdens, but at worst
measures steps for a slower choreography—
ever-listening for that mantra of the harvest.

It is a study for the shrinks and anthropologists,
a someday segment for future scrutiny, corrals
along the road,

                                tight-clad and helmeted
                                bicyclists in the mist, sailing
                                past black cows sorted
                                from bawling calves, breath
                                clouds rising, steaming

in the unforecast wet before we brand, before
the steady rain that did not deter, did not dissuade
the throw-back purpose for the day.

Winter wet hair glistening between cockleburs
gleaned along creek banks overnight
from last year’s rains, tall battalions of dry stalks
waiting for milk-fat calves to carry on, to carry seed
into the future, but for the bare squares sheered
from each right hip, the clippers’ whine that begs
a gas-driven generator to cough and purr from idle,
time and again, to override our quips and conversation.

                                No slices of silence, vibrating
                                in a pickup bed, lashed
                                and wanting to escape—
                                stiff orange cord dodging
                                tangles with legs, steel shod
                                hooves in slick clay.

Kinked and gritty nylon twine wears rawhide
and leather burners slow to slide, or refuse
to build into a loop—my fingers raw and red,
too numb to tell coils from reins—my lariat
eats deeply into a cotton-wrapped horn
when I catch and bring a calf to the fire.
I stare off once again, another branding
in Homer’s Cove, grinning now into the rain.

Working together on the ground, wet hair
plastered to your smile, we grin and look
like children, but for the gray and canyons cut
by time and sun, running rivulets as we bow
to each calf, little river waterfalls off my brim—
a cadenced mantra of needle injections, tag,
earmark and brand—gobbed white fat spilling
from bull calves. Before the last one
slides to the fire, before we need cleats
for traction, before the muddy group photo
that includes the horseback family

                                that connects us to the magic
                                of New York’s ticker-tape parade
                                for the 2012 Super Bowl champs—

                                but especially the placard
                                that loves Bear’s tight end.

                                                                  for the Pascoes

Brought home a little cold
lingering in fits of coughing, remembering
the moment pneumonia set in
outside the Star 2009, inhaling
a cigarette and twenty below,
or smoking in the alley between
the Stray Dog and the Pioneer bar:
Mike Beck & the Bohemian Saints
pounding sound, like hammer to anvil—
old kids removed from the flagellating
and flailing crowd, flesh pressed
to howling, rocking blocks around.

Who’s hand, who’s hug, who’s heart
allowed the germ to spring like grass
thick after a warm rain? All the kind souls
come for comforting. All the lost ghosts
of the missing that haunt the Stockman’s,
its timbers now begging for another fire.

Unless you are a young poet,
one doesn’t go to Elko in January
on a whim—the cold middle-of-nowhere
makes its sort of the weak-hearted,
of the cowboy dilettantes and devos,
because everyone leaves
with a little something,
like it or not.

When you see dotted hillsides greening,
imagine puddles lining crumbling asphalt
on the road along the creek, bare limbs
rooted in the bank clinging to gray skies—

when you hear their call from the high desert
sea of sage, through pastel grasses
and red willow pools, streams framed white
beneath purple islands dusted snow,

from over the granite Sierra Nevada wall
seven hundred highway miles from home—
a man should know where he belongs
and learn to not overstay his welcome.