drycrikjournal

I still remember
spring Sunday mornings
rustling covers and dreams awake—

“Great day,” he’d say,
“for the race,” emphatically—
as if we knew.

This cheery departure
for our father waving
at dawn streaming
from the Kaweah peaks
to mottled cottonwoods
along the river,
its glistening steam
rising into the light
had to be special.

“What race?”
I begged an answer.
“The human race,”
he’d say.

Tree and stone, earth and grass,
among them we must ask,
‘what is our place, what is our task?’

Stumblebums, we lack the bounding grace
of deer, the keening hawk, the tree limb
turned by wind and sun—we detract,

I fear, so out of touch, so out of step
in the earnest dance around us.
Stepping lightly as a boy in US Keds,

gun in hand, I left my marks for dead
that fed the buzzards trailing me
in thermal glide, for Red Tails watching

from the oak tops for the wounded,
for the cripples crawling desperately—
and I thought I’d found my place

where the wild could reason
and adapt to trust and think
enough of me to follow closely.

Riding the High Country as a boy,
I fished snowmelt lakes
beneath sharp peaks of scree,

found clarity around a fire,
played dot-to-dot with stars,
and dreamed on hard ground

that I’d awake unscathed,
but for my craving for space
beyond the hand of man.

A lifetime addiction,
betting on the weather
and a herd of cows grazing

foothills below, we wager
borrowed money, but don’t know
how to quit gambling

with the market and the politics
this close to heaven—we’ll
role the dice until we’re gone.

In our three score and ten,
we haven’t changed the world much—
though we marched for peace,

married and twice divorced
during continuous conflicts overseas,
over who knows what

philosophy it paid to exterminate. Now
it turns too fast for us and we retreat
like old bucks before the hunt.

                                             for JEG

Young ladies bathing beyond the cattails—
it could be the Nile or the Kaweah
pooling slowly in the summer heat

before the dams, before man began
to turn the earth around. We can’t
ignore the pesky fly in the ointment.