I am amused with the new vocabulary of weathermen like “hydroclimate whiplash” during the atmospheric rivers a couple of years ago. I just read a new one, we’re on day 21 of our “tule stratus” as we head to Paregien’s to gather for Wednesday’s branding where hopefully we’ll be above the fog.
It’s early yet for rain,
for distant silhouettes
of cows and fresh calves
beneath oak trees
nurturing poetry
with murmurs and licks
on a young mother’s tongue.
A slow rhythm and meter
for weeks in the womb
that rumble clearly now:
single syllables,
grunts and moans—
a universal language
instinct pumps
forever between them.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2019
Tagged Calves, cows, language, photography, poetry
With wild imagination, the sky
speaks in colors and contortions
before storms settle in the mountains,
as gray clouds scout a trail to camp,
a granite peak to rest upon,
run aground, snow and rain.
Three score years plus
of looking up—and away,
daydreaming fleeting poetry
even as a child out the window
of a forced nap—another tongue
with no letters in its language,
only colors and shapes
from every perspective,
no two the same.
That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.
– Wendell Berry (“A Warning To My Readers”)
Those who work beside me hear
the gerunds and gerundives mesh
with coarser nouns and verbs
that flourish on unlevel landscapes
among the animals and birds,
or whispered under breath
in politer conversation
like adding grain to polished wood—
profane accents and accidents
straining to leap from my tongue.
drycrikjournal 