drycrikjournal

The green is gone.
No need to say
we need a rain

praying privately
under our breaths—
no Congressman

to write to,
too busy with politics
to notice.

Gather to brand.
Feed hay.
It’s all normal.

Certain places, certain
as the ridge’s blinding light
at dawn, embrace us—

draw the pain away,
the poison that the brain
has let fester behind our eyes.

They need not speak, yet
the breeze rhymes
in the limbs of trees,

where the business of birds
changes with the seasons, yet
will not change the ways

of the world. Certain places
find their peace in the mundane
details, the stamen’s sure

perfume pollinators share
upon the petals’ opening
their doors to seed. Certain.

When I was new to these hills,
great rocks rose to find my way
along a native track—coyote,

deer and that of cattle—
dirt worn soft by pad and hoof.
I gave each a name

to place me on this ground
when I was lost, or turned
around on gray fog days.

Weather-sculpted, laced
with lichen color, some
take the shape of humans

that haven’t changed, frozen
in time before men came
to live among them—

mark the stories of the hunt
and gather of the untamed.
These rocks remember

without words, a warm
language recorded
for the species that survive us.

Not quite full, we cheer its rising
on a ridgeline of oaks, naked
silhouettes posing before a fire—

its steady ascension between and beyond
heaven’s contrails—as the busyness
of this planet becomes small.

We never quite give-in to the ground,
though it shapes faces and scars our flesh—
mountains and canyons worn apart

from the crowd, our trained brains taught
to see the smaller things while looking out
over purple ranges to snow white teeth

sunk sharply into the blue, blue sky
after a cold rain clears the air, erases
tracks, cleans all but the near at hand

climbing higher for the tallest green
hidden in the old, gray grass, mildewing—
cows and calves full atop the ridge,

friends and family lying in leafless shade
looking out beyond the perfect dreams
of our calculations ever coming out.