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.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged dams, flood, photography, poetry, prayer, rain, rain goddess, rivers, snow, weather
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.
(click)
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