
Too bright to sleep
or wrestle with dreams
with a full Sturgeon hole
rising from the ridgeline
into the night sky
like a gigantic galactic leak
upon us, for all the UFOs
and UAPs to pass through,
for all the excuses we need
to behave like lunatics.

runs over boulders,
spills and spumes
into deep green pools
or into cutbanks
exposing roots
hiding rainbow trout
beneath a dogwood’s
white blooming
I can’t let go.
Overgrown, no room
for a kid to cast
a deer hair fly—
fresh flow of time
behind me now
I go there yet
without thinking,
without yearning,
with nothing more
than feeling
the untamed current
still run through me.

Summer heat intense enough
to forget the rainy days beyond
the blinding sheets of delirium
framed in flames. The trickle
of the creek shrinks each day
as young cows bring calves down
to shade and well-water
before we gather to wean—
first-calvers looking for relief,
yearning for those days of virginity,
of curious discovery free
from bovine responsibilities.
Never in this world the same,
yet no better mother than a cow—
Happy Mother’s Day!
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2025, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged cow, Mother's Day, photography, poetry, weather

Like fighter jets after hawks,
they nose dive the dog,
attack from redwood boughs
to protect a fledgling
too soon on the ground.
A community, a murder, a grind,
a merle or murmuration
of blackbirds has moved-in,
displaced the finches’
crimson dance upon the rail
with cocky walks and orgies
of foreplay and flittering sex
anywhere they please—but ready
to herd a rattlesnake
out of the garden and barnyard.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2025, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged Brewer's Blackbird, collective nouns, Dry Creek, photography, poetry

Blading the season’s last green grass
for firebreaks, I need to concentrate
far away from the world’s turmoil,
peel the weeds out of the soil
or sever their roots, over and over
the same ground until smooth—
an impatient perfectionist,
carving a twelve foot road
the cattle will travel and dimple
like a golf ball, but will stop fire
if not too windy to ignite
wild oats and tall dry feed
easier than I can throttle back
the flow of pompous rhetoric
that has ignited global animosity.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2025, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged firebreaks, photography, poetry, politics
Posted in Haiku 2025, Photographs, Poems 2025, poetry
Tagged Calves, haiku, photography, poetry

What has happened to the world,
the people, the planet,
now that we can measure
parts per billion,
the distance in light years
to the nearest black hole.
Crowded in corrals,
we are bent beneath the weight
of useless information
shouldering our way
to the EXIT gate
to shed the burdens
of mind and flesh—
lifetimes spent
trying to escape?
What has happened to the world,
this magic planet,
its Mother Goose,
her golden eggs
the rogues are after
mining the moon?
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2025, poetry
Tagged golden eggs, moon, Mother Goose, photography, poetry