drycrikjournal

Fat calves in the pipeline
to your plate, cows
vacationing on hollow dry

bronze feed, the scent of cuds
early to the shade
of sycamore and oak trees,

quiet gossiping telepathically—
it’s taken days to unwind,
coast to a more pensive pace.

Thirty days into summer, the heat
owns us now and we yield, change
our ways to work into the shade

of anything between us and the sun.
Out of habit, a neighbor’s cow stands
beneath the skeleton of an old oak,

a ridge-bound casualty of the drought—
a silhouette mid-morning as I head home
branded in my brain like a wrought iron

logo for outdoor living hanging
from an arched concrete entrance—
beyond which I am blinded

by the white light of my delirium.
I close my eyes to see clearly again,
turn away and pray I may be wrong.

Moonrise at her throat, a glowing pendant,
hair spilling into the creek as she sleeps, and
when the light leaves, her dark silhouette

begins to breathe as the hills come alive at night.
Native women dance where they have worn
the ground to a powdery, fine dust, easy to inhale—

their chanting rises with the moon as coyotes answer
from the canyons these past ten thousand years.
Temporary, we become lost in the landscape—

our souls, the depth of our flesh absorbed,
secreted in her creases for safekeeping as we wait
just beyond the reach of certain change.