Funny how I can’t remember
just how the Lupine looked
like a brand-new town,
the crowded Gilia, white heads
bowed without a photograph
for proof. All the pretty faces
gone, I have a crush on spring—
as my mother, her coffee cup
beside me, would often say
of my impetuousness—I fall hard,
all ill feelings squeezed
from the inside out, swept away.
But etched in my skin, in the walls
of my brain, I can’t forget the dust,
every particle I inhaled of drought.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2016, Ranch Journal
Tagged Drought, flower-friday, gilia, lupine, photography, poetry, wildflowers
and holy
days asleep in the calendar wake up and chime.
– William Stafford (“How You Know”)
Tree frogs awake in the dark,
in the rain, a steady wave of chorusing
croaks upon croak—thousands
clear the air in their throats
again and again, prolong moments
no one else seems to want.
I pause in my tracks listening
deep into the wet blackness to a holy
tradition begun before man.
0.88″
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2016, Ranch Journal
Tagged "How You Know", Chia, lupine, tree frogs, William Stafford
We know how it goes
after a storm, sometimes
wet fog clings for days,
weighs on the mind
when we can’t see out –
can’t feel the sun move
within us. The first light
white will blind us,
before the colors come
reaching for blue, blue
sky and cumulus sailing
into shapes we recognize.
And so it goes from dark 
tempests and torrents,
before the lupine leafs
from bare sticks, before
its purple plumes wave
into the buzzing, warm
pulse that will fade
again with the sun – yet
no season, the same.
(click)
