drycrikjournal

Looking forward to the last cows
among the fractured rock towns
and a wild band of oaks, at ease,

a Red Tail shadow streams
silently along the new green
between trees, suddenly—

as if playing tag, counting
coup with our silhouette: man
and beast. Why look up?

After awhile the hills wrap
around you, hold life secure:
the rock, hawk and oak tree

still, sharp ridges holding
our eyes. At these corrals
we are both small and safe,

always. It takes years
to be taught, to wonder
and recognize good fortune

with the fade of old faces
and all the good horses
that have danced here.

                                         for Earl

Kyle Loveall & Douglas Thomason. Earl McKee photo

                    A little too abstract, a little too wise,
                    It is time for us to kiss the earth again.
                               – Robinson Jeffers (“Return”)

But we may not have the currency
to invest anymore, now that town
has rebooted our minds, changed

the circuitry, on feed in Fat City,
right off I-5. Not even a glance up
at the smooth Coalinga Hills

to graze old times, find a canyon
to get lost in. We may be too
well-bred to return and get by.

In December’s amber light, the sun
stares beneath the limbs of trees aflame
again. And from long, crisp shadows,

a few wild gods dance with winter’s chill.
No call for calendars when every canyon
rings with the bellows of bulls looking

for work, or a fight, reducing fences to
barbed wire nightmares, splintered posts
with long excavations either side of tangles.

During nights of no moon, the big talk fires
testosterone and fence repair, purpose here
as the sweet fragrance of cows fills the air.

seemed so long, and weeks eternities
between recesses and vacations, lifetimes—
especially when ranch work replaced trouble.

Through the gate like cattle counted now,
they pass six or eight deep—heads, backs
and tails eclipsed and so blurred, we

might have missed one, or miscounted since
the beginning of time. There is a place, like
here, just after that, days had neither names

nor numbers, great herds grazing the planet,
eras when we might have lost a year or two
under endless skies guided by starlight.

                                 …and yet God she’d scarcely got to know.
                                              – Rainer Maria Rilke (“Eve”)

In our minds we have tried to recreate Eden:
worry-free and unabashed as we disrobe
and stride the creek, lounge with the beasts
and birds in harmony, grazing as we go.

And ever since the golden quince, we yearn
for ignorance, for distance from the news,
for the discarded leaf to hide beneath
during thunderstorms of more information.

All becomes a garden when the serpent
leaves deep portals to the underworld
to crawl among the sweet and sour berries,
as Tihpiknit’s right-hand man—to keep us

honest, dispatching the deceitful—where
rivers of fish, wild meat, bone and hide
fat with acorns see through the eyes of trees
and listen to the birds to forecast weather.

                        …we walk the bottom of an ocean we call sky.
                                                – Jim Harrison (“River II”)

It is our nature to believe in more
beyond the surface—though we toil
for plenty here upon the ocean’s floor,

a hierarchy of bottom fish, both slim
and fat—wanting to believe in something
more attainable to all, a free place

for the spirit to try its wings in the light,
beyond the murky depths shadowed by
darker silhouettes of sharks and whales.

How deep the sky! Unnamed on maps,
near Coyote Pass, 10,000 feet above it all,
‘CRITES LAKE’ perforated with an ice pick

in the tin, square bottom of a five-gallon can
placed near the outlet jammed with dark
green backs of rainbow trout spawning,

every one a pound or more in those days.
Just before the moon rose and the granite
glowed like a lantern, there seemed no end

to the stars—far, tiny bubbles glinting
near the surface, our passenger jets
and sputniks streaking beneath them.