drycrikjournal

It’s still a funny world of mostly men
among men in front of women, old
bulls with half-bowed necks, that

awkward uncertainty searching for
a postured cure, a familiar stance –
we give them space, let little voices

from unruly classrooms fade as if
not listening, as if nothing was said,
hoping an echo rings in their heads.

Pawed dirt with bellow and bluster,
some wear bald spots on thick skulls,
spar for hours in a pasture of cows –

yet the unemployed, when sequestered
together, can harmonize their grumbling
from the comfort of distant shade trees.

The scene opens around a fire,
shadows of huddled men dancing
to white coals stirred for another chunk
of tamarack, bell mare grazing
distant darkness by granite starlight,
sweet and damp in her nostrils,
to the snowmelt’s murmur
leaking down into another world.

You are there among them now,
young and listening in thin night air,
following a herd of horses from
Cuyama up the Kern, over Farewell
to the miners in Mineral King
by yourself at seventeen – Onus Brown.

If lucky, you may be a story only,
a far-fetched tale of discarded truth –
short chapters of wild accomplishment
that will not matter in the future,
but for the embellished retelling.

The camera zooms into eyes a glint
beneath your brim, cigarette inhaled,
jug tipped, passed and burning still –
nothing worse among these men,
than to have nothing left to tell.

We are, of course, quite common people,
wrinkled and scarred – not yet immune
to dreaming, to the private illusions

we wear like subdued tattoos that tell
more around the eyes and hands. We move
with habit calling to be fed, searching

horizons at first light, filling mangers
from barns built to keep us busy
circling in the same place. Always

other lives off-stage in the wings,
like ladies-in-waiting to the queen
who rules the barnyard, we protect

near borders from wild encroachment
pressing, always pressing-in – we adapt
by adopting a most common sense.