The crows know what time
the maids come to clean—
leave their cart of sheets and towels,
TP and soap, coffee and especially
creamers unattended.
They wait on the roof.
Black fledglings watch the plastic peal,
peck when they can to help,
nothing’s spilt.
It’s part of the price
to stay on the coast
where no one seems to notice.
Long dead,
it sheds its limbs
atop the knoll
where generations
of women bent to
grind granite
for acorn meal.
No longer shade,
a bony spire
for our pair
of crows to make
feather-quivering love
balanced in the light,
has finally succumbed
to gravity. Perch gone
we hope and trust
they’ll stay on
another season.
They shiver after
making love on a dead branch
facing the future.
Weekly Photo Challenge: ‘Happy Place’
Behind our back, ground squirrels
crawling on their bellies raid
the peach tree, an Elberta with huge
fruit starting to color that bob
and bounce across the pasture,
bigger than the heads that run
with them gripped in yellow teeth.
Come evening, a flutter of black
feathers, our resident pair of crows
dining at the fence line on scattered
cadavers, fuzzy lumps awaiting
buzzards for breakfast.
Everyone trying to make a living,
nothing goes to waste,
not even peaches.
– for Mas Masumoto
We have come the long way,
rode uneven ground together
ever since that first day
bringing cattle off the mountain,
you there, at the corrals:
Craig’s branding at the cabin.
I could only see pieces of you
busy outside, between the boards,
as we parted cows from calves.
Or was it when he died young,
all consoling one another?
Perhaps the Belle Point cows,
my mixed and colored herd,
fat calves grazing spring,
let you let me touch your hand.
We were friends a long time
before our pillow talk of trust
and honesty, before all this
circling home and horse barn,
our ever-changing garden,
black first-calf heifers at the fence
looking in as we look out
at what we’ve done as one
the long way ‘round.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2015, Ranch Journal
Tagged April Fools, Belle Point, Belle Point cows, crows
Two centuries of women
gone beyond
healing and grinding,
needing shade
away from men—
dead Live Oak place
to roost for years,
our pair of crows
make familiar
flutters of love
balanced on a branch,
know one another’s
every feather,
preen and quiver
with how it feels
into the gloaming
afterwards.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2015
Tagged birds, crow lovers, crows, Kaweah, Live Oak, photographs, poetry, wildlife, Yokuts
(click)
drycrikjournal 