drycrikjournal

We play a game we don’t like,
switch hats to become feedlot boys –
get afoot in the corral once the cows
are parted. Clang! Bang! steel
upon steel crowding flesh, fat calves
channeled head to tail as the chute
ratchets another neck for vaccine
guns, ID tags, fly control and
anything else – we see ourselves
as children, the first days jammed
in school, every muscle hard,
eyes wild – some hurt themselves
and we hate it, hate authority
and all the economic rules that say
we must to stay a horseback.

I look into the big pen, pause
to meet anxious faces of mothers
waiting for their first born
to leave the clatter of confinement,
gathered in the early cool before
breakfast, paired sides already pressed,
nurse warm milk. They are forgiving
and some forget quicker than others –
some more sensitive than we. But
we have acquiesced, become a cog
in a corporate machine, guilty
in our own eyes, in the eyes of all
the old cowboys who never packed
fencing pliers or a pipe wrench,
guilty in the eyes of those we feed.

                        Forgive the hymn, friend. Out of doors
                        it doesn’t count as praying.
                                     – Quinton Duval (“One Bright Morning”)

It may be hours before a word escapes
my mouth across the creek, through
half-a-dozen gates latched behind me

like pairs of quail disturbed for a moment –
over snake tracks and caravans of ants
beneath the inquisitive wing of a Red Tail.

Suddenly, I hear my voice come from
the outside in, a gravelly phrase added
to conclude the conversation in my head.

I have to laugh at my reply in the same voice
before one of us cuts it short – like making
ugly faces, it could be habit forming,

so addictive that I might forever stay
praying like crazy in the wilderness,
talking to cattle and animals, to twisted

trees, perfect springs, ever-seeping – all
who say lots of things these days, as if they
knew something – and someone’s got to listen.

We can call it anything we want,
anytime, anywhere in whispers –
chins tucked under our breaths.

We can pray to oak trees and rocks,
bless spring seeps and marvel
with maroon skies before the flood

of deadfall measures the creek bank.
We can set free whatever words we want,
quietly – and it should be enough.

I believe there is a day we might see
beyond ourselves, and those inadequacies
willows understand once swept-up

in boiling turmoils of blinding sand
and grit, the underwater churning, gasping
for either breath or grip with nothing

else on their minds. I believe, perhaps
have even seen, looked ‘round the roster
of characters and wondered who the hell

was pulling strings, and why? But I
believe we will prevail, what humans left
to sail our ship to a better place. The ground

is gone, no virgin wool waiting for Leather
Stocking British impudence, the good
soil has been farmed for centuries, and

the best of it planted with short dreams
of long rides into black and white sunsets.
But we lose heart when it counts most,

trying to forget from where we’ve come,
already shaking hands and hosting social
occasions, as if the last election meant

something. I believe that we will see our
neighbor’s bounty as our own, that the sweet
fruit comes from well-beyond our city limits.

Looking for strays, it had been years,
the gate replaced, an unknown combination lock
and chain, but light panel wired beside it, I go
decades back to weathered boards that drug
and the rattlesnake dispatched with the elliptical
edge of a Boy Scout canteen – my April birthday
overnight and hike with pals from town –
red dirt canyon shaped the same, filled
with purple Grass Nut spilling over clover
and green rip gut. Mary Pohot’s daughters had
to hear high-pitched bravado ring well-before
we got there to be lectured about killing things.

Cold spring water offered at their house
and the dilapidated barn the Woodlake kids
were taking down to look for tomahawks
and knives before Mary died in 1960, before
they moved to town to live on little chunks
of ground they sold Granddad, until the last
landlocked forty-acres of hilltop steep was bought
by a speculator in L.A., sight unseen, then
swapped for a commission along the way –
at fifty bucks an acre in those days.

House and barn long leveled now, slicked off clean
with the border of white narcissus that lingered
years without attention, the spring flows into pond,
and the rock pile I hid within, same as when
the town kids playing cowboys emptied their .22s
to ricochet around me. I crawled downcanyon low
the long way home when I was twelve. The other
long battle remembered, begun when the unfenced
forty finally sold to a cousin, after a realtor’s widow,
at Dad’s suggestion, came to see what she had to sell,
was stopped at the gate by another rattlesnake –
parlayed into precedent for California Partition Law
that was spitefully spawned at the Pohot Place.

I doubt wild pigeons gather by the hundreds
anymore for acorns in the fall, clouds of wings
circling the bowl of Blue Oaks around this
secluded ground. I shot one once, then couldn’t
waste it – picked, gutted and cooked it on a fire
built from guilt near the cemetery gate
to rows of headstones, mounds under weeds,
the wood and marble crosses broken-off
that bore names and dates – a place to let
the mind go, feel the eyes of generations still.

It is their faces, I remember,
heavy with calf, deep and careful
looks from questioning dark eyes
circled around me as I counted
walking, standing among them,
still – making our twice-a-day
ritual easy, visiting to inspect
loose progress without the hay.

Their tag numbers are familiar
rhymes from clipboard paper,
disconnected dates and notes
that may be useful someday –
but now it is their faces
I remember in this pasture
lazing before us, their first
fat calves soon to be weaned.

Drawn with evening close
to the house, to my loud
conversation tossed at gods
who understand, to you moving
in the garden, changing water,
picking strawberries, we are
comforted like family
brought back together again.

Generations out of poison oak
and fractured granite come
to us now. There are other worlds
with good fortune, other ways
to feel important, but none come
so willingly out of the wild
with such trust, just to say hello
or follow wherever we go.