Color comes with cold and wet
within the canyon, even before
the creek flows or sycamores burn
leather brown to shed their clothes—
white bodies tangled in a pagan dance
to gods unknown. Orioles return
as sparks in the brush, levity
in the pink overcast of dawn.
We glean the fallen skeletons
of oak and brittle manzanita
to fill the woodstove. Curious cattle
come to wonder what we’re about.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2022, Ranch Journal
Tagged cattle, colors, Drought, Dry Creek, Fire, firewood, Manzanita, photography, poetry, rain, sycamores, weather
Following an old hill track within dry
grasses and trees, dust worn thin,
soft and deep by pad and hoof,
dark shadows reach for shades of brown.
Once blond heads of wild oats bent
by breezes, now bleached by the sun,
hang empty and delicate on hollow stems
awaiting grazing or a rain to lay them down
atop the rosy clutch of fillaree
claiming ground in brittle curls beneath.
Blue Oaks gray with turquoise leaves,
leather-like among the naked skeletons
of grandfathers shedding limbs, lesions
of good hardwood, too heavy to support
without water on these battlefields,
the wounded and dead-standing, but
decomposing monuments to better centuries—
a range of color spreading into dying light.
(click)
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