drycrikjournal

I surprise myself with where my faith lies,
hiding in the underbrush, bugs and smaller
things busy making lives but only slightly

better, bees in a hive, ants undermining
damn-near everything for shelter and storage,
food supplies. I am a believer in small things

to deliver paradoxes wrapped in irony, regularly—
it’s how life works: when the little man, or
woman, if you insist, leans to the starboard

with the rest against the captain, too light to port.
Stafford’s heron, reeds into the mud, exalts
in Spirit, has no shame nor need for explanation.

They do not fear death, cannot conceive of not
living, not adapting—our curse to seek some
everlasting life somewhere better,

someplace free of sin and worry, hate
and jealousy we couldn’t shake in this life.
I have faith in much smaller things.

                    …feet that go down in the mud where the truth is.
                              – William Stafford (“Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron”)

If I learned nothing else from energetic Dr. Raymond Alf,
it was ‘pond wootah’, where microscopic cells of life form
from hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon molecules

to attach and reattach in the stagnation, out of the mud
we crawled. He saw God in the bottom of the Grand Canyon
as a single cell, a fossilized drop in a hardened sea of mud.

We will go back to the that place and become unraveled
with the detritus of all our discarded poems, with all the love
that never materialized, mixed with the anger and hate

we may not have overcome, to start over years from now,
and so on. But what about the whole-soul of us
looking for a place to light, a familiar branch to rest and wait

for someone listening? Hawk or bear or bobcat even,
we become this place each time we leave, but always eager
to return, to reconnect with the spirit of this mud.

The real news comes to us without asking:

                    down the creek, an upstream rain
                    or cap of snow on cabs of cars
                    late to work, or moon dog rings
                    in puddled stars, or sirens come
                    and coyotes howl before
                    Valero’s tow truck—ever busy
                    on the narrow weekend road uphill.

Trailered 4 x 4s and crumpled wrecks
come down mountains of muddy fun
or quick retreats up with their God,
or both:

                    where clean air and pines
                    collide with jobs
                    for the damage to repair.

We know the road and the time it takes,
offer details to one another, write the story
as they limp by to share next morning,
collaborating like we’ve always done

                    along a road
                    of neighbors
                    passing.

Winter hills, new grass gone brown between
short fuzz of last year’s feed hasn’t changed

day after a two-inch rain, but we believe we see
a tinge of green, ridge tops cattle-dotted,

holding moisture as our minds search knowing
what the color of these hills, will and ought to be—

like cows and calves leaving bottoms in the storm,
forgetting hay, ground turned soft between their toes—

climbing to where grass comes first, all believing
they can taste the green that comes from a night rain.

                               And much I grieved to think how power and will
                    In opposition rule our mortal day –

                               And why God made irreconcilable
                    Good and the means of good…
                                        – Percy Bysshe Shelley (“The Triumph of Life”)

Damn-little new under the sun, our shadows stretch and shrink against
an ever-changing light. I remember the power I had as a boy, the cat
I couldn’t quite get killed and then remove from its misery, high in a tree.
A lesson not quite buried, now after sixty years. But they’ll have it all,

debating state-to-state, trading insults I hope the world is not watching,
in case one of them is elected, representing us, fresh from these playground
antics of one-upmanship like when high-school boys playing grab ass
to the mini-skirted girls in the bleachers—all trying to be cute and cool.

I hear no philosophy, no consistent thought, no high ideals, no change
in the stagnating economic status quo of amended statistics we’ve grown
deaf to. No flag, no bumper stickers on my hay rig—perhaps I am too old
to get excited, find a cause not fraught with non-sense, but good

is not bestowed like candy to children, not a blanket to wrap our fears
within, nothing permanent we can’t improve—instead it grows
miraculously right out of the dirt, upwards with water, roots down deep.
You can nurture it, tend and grow with it everyday, or just eat the fruit.

January 27, 2012

                    I watched with envy as my brother swung wired hay from
the business end of the baler by the hook, stacked bales neat and swift on the
                                                                                                                                            trailer,
pure symmetry, muscle, motion, my summers spent inside a book. Where
does it all go, all that ability, buried desire, unused metaphor, the collective art
that elevates us from all creation?
                                  – Twyla Hansen (“Leap of Faith”)

Apart from piercing space with tiny needles packed with blinking
sensors and paneled instruments, one might hope that same gravity
that ties us here, that holds billions of bugs beneath the tread of thin air,

would keep it all around us—there’s no escape even for our aging flesh
that pauses now to trace a twisting limb in search of grace, a home
to store our yearnings. I can’t remember if she followed me,

towel tied around my neck, off the barn roof into plowed ground,
both believing that if we believed, we could fly. Those grand conspiracies
as children. What evil germ crawled inside my ear, suggested

I cut my sister’s hair smeared with paint and Vaseline before the mirror
where mother harrowed it, pulled forehead and all into a tight and shiny
pony’s tail? That same day I smashed empty Coke bottles on the doorstep,

pulled-up Granddad’s fresh tomato plants—even now, events fade,
sorted-off to single moments to be dematerialized, subatomic dust
into the atmosphere. We must be careful what we breathe and trust

that there is more good than we can see floating out there—raw
material to be received and recreated—so when humanity pauses
to inhale the dawn each morning, it can take a long deep breath.

___________________________________

Twyla Hansen & Linda Hasselstrom have conspired together in a wonderful new book of poetry: Dirt Songs: A Plains Duet from the The Backwaters Press. Review

Don’t tell the neighbors I’m up early
reading, writing poetry behind this light
off the road, not addressing deskwork
stacked around me, where Jeffers, Harrison
& Berry rise to the surface of a puddle
of papers from beyond my dark world—
here Stafford flows a gentle stream.

Loud and profane, it don’t make sense
to most—impatient and quick to be critical,
it doesn’t fit all they’ve heard
and I’ve forgotten, embellished seeds
grown wild and entangled on this uneven
ground beneath the sun’s harsh light
that I can’t claim for the life of me.

A man can’t ride naked in the brush
and expect to make it, can’t run with the herd
and find fresh feed unless he’s up front,
better for aching knees to graze away
early mornings when everyone’s asleep,
just dreaming, not adding to the traffic
on what seems to be a one-way street.

Just before the rain, my neighbor calls
that he’s got my bull. ‘Had him around
Christmas, but he went back.’
Now he’s grumbling in his corral
two crow miles away, but a thirty-minute
drive through town around the mountains
after the all-day fight with his king
of them all grousing now beneath a tree.

‘They’ll be alright, just limp sore,’
he tells me on the phone. I get
the picture only time will cure. ‘Sorry
to complicate your day, John.’

Sorry too, I recall my Herefords
the last three years on him, scouting
more after two months out with my cows.
He says he doesn’t care, but I know
better and apologize.

Before I leave, I feed cows
on short grass, scratch my head
over a second set of twins,
three sucking a single cow now—
surely a daughter of old Ghost,
dark circles around her eyes
the exact size of the hollow holes
in a cow skull, yet more refined:
less ear and better bag.

The old aluminum gooseneck rattles
behind me, patched half-a-dozen times
since ’86 when I bought it new, drug
up and down hills with thousands
of weaned calves now—it rattles
as the brakes squeal empty
at the canyon’s end stop sign:
gray from the Kaweah Peaks west
to eternity, where all the storms
come from over the Coast Range
we can’t see anymore.

Woodlake’s four-way intersection
slow with a line of yellow buses
hauling restless kids home, pressing
at the windows, a wave of hands
in a cage like writhing snakes
ready to be scattered and released.
I drive slowly up Valencia, the main drag
past the hardware claiming half-a-block—
but all that hasn’t changed here
since I was a boy. I try to be invisible
and inconspicuous, dried cow dung
slung down the trailer’s sides,
I keep the rattle low without
a place to fit a license plate
since I’ve owned it.

My neighbor finally got the County
to fix the road beyond the gate
to his place—damn-good job
and smooth as thick black glass.
But the potholes getting there
are still bad, will grow more grass
when it rains, I’m guessing
he’s the one that did the fixing.

Best place to load a gooseneck
around, I swing up and back
like a pro to a rock and gravel
platform, a railroad tie high
at the end of a gated pipe lane.
My Angus bull in the pen on water
moans, backed bowed, head low
watches me without taking
that first step to see how bad
he’s hurt, waiting to see
just what the hell I want—
he’s in a bad mood, and turns
up the volume for one last grumble
goodbye to the shade tree
as he steps gingerly through
the gates and into the trailer.

His weight keeps the rattle down
back through town, and I take corners
quicker through the orange groves,
but feel the sore ton of him shift
and slow all the way to the gate
to the bull pen and a handful
of late-calving cows, plus the old
horned Hereford who’s had his onus
on them all for years. He looks
at me and then down into the pasture,
stepping out reluctantly. Standing
in the middle of the road, he can’t help
himself but bellow, grumbling as he goes.

                                                  for Tony Rabb