Tag Archives: dams

INTRINSIC HABIT

 

 

 

Too many years courting goddesses,

genuflecting at the foot of ridgetops:

oak trees sharp and close enough to touch

 

to beg relief—to even entertain

such shameful blasphemy, such

feeble will to forever lose their ear.

 

Every river canyon churns to fill

and spill its reservoirs, white-capped

Sierras stacked with two-year’s snowpack

 

awaiting summer’s melt to flood the flats

and yet I can’t concede what is not me:

always ready, waiting for a good-hard rain.

 

 

DAMN DAMS

I still call it “the Swamp”

where thirsty Valley Oaks

centuries-old shed their limbs

among barkless skeletons,

bleached bones like flesh

waiting to fall into the next life.

 

Half-mile across on Christmas Eve,

1955, the Kaweah flowed to the doors

of our ’53 Buick—headlights

diving into oncoming wakes

like Captain Nemo’s submarine.

 

Not free to run when it wants,

we have held the river up

in the hills for sixty winters,

only to let it run all at once

across the Valley to irrigate

orchards and summer crops—

no kids fishing from shady banks

a lazy river recharging wells.

 

We can’t fill the dams we have,

yet cotton trailer billboards suggest

that dams can make more water

without looking to the sky.