Busy finding myself
between unfinished jobs
I have forgotten,
words leap
to start a line
of another poem
I’ll never finish:
half-baked epiphanies,
humorous futilities
like litter left behind me
doesn’t get the job done,
but makes the work
a little more fun.
How I crave the feel
of an old soft rope
in my hand,
spoke-balance loop
like an open mouth
hungry for heels
in the branding pen.
Fifty years
I’ve marked calves
on this spot,
chicken-coop corrals:
bog in the gate
that Giz built:
hog wire stapled
over a 2 x 6 rectangle
I drug through the mud—
replaced and almost forgotten.
It’s hard to let go:
same horseback look
south down-canyon,
creek meandering a bowl
of fresh green feed,
safe and apart
from a hazy world
beyond the narrows—
the feel of my rope
among neighbors
roping calves around a fire—
reliving a dream
on a borrowed horse.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2019
Tagged branding, Calves, Homer Cove, photography, poetry
Up early, awaiting
confirmation of the storm
slated to rain out plans
to brand calves
without complaining,
feeding hay
on slick roads
to thin cows
as grass grows
against the cold
Winter Solstice.
Nothing on the news
but red and blue politics,
mass shootings
and fog on 99,
ads for fast foods,
wonder drugs
and old age—
not one damn thing
I want. Nothing
I can change
but feed more hay
to hungry souls.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2019
Tagged branding, Calves, cows, photography, poetry, politics, rain, weather
I lived in town for a moment,
a neighborhood around the Shrine—
Black on one side,
college kids, the other
in a subdivided,
old two-story
peeling paint
we called Big Pink.
Weekend mecca for loud
electric sounds, Janis
and the Revolution wailing—
the street would teem
with strobe-lit kids,
weed wafting sidewalk trees,
trying to ignore the War,
Kent State and the M-16
awaiting graduation.
Landmarks close,
I had no plans to map—
yet found myself asleep
retracing trails
to High Sierra meadows,
bell mare edging
a snowmelt lake,
pine smoke and
a leaky bucket sky at night.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2019
Tagged 1970, Los Angeles, photography, poetry, USC, Vietnam War
There’s a dragon with matches that’s loose on the town
Takes a whole pail of water just to cool him down.
– Grateful Dead (“Fire on the Mountain”)
After rain,
willows aflame,
green on black:
photographs
of germinating
truth taking root
after fire—after
the smoke clears
and dust disappears
with seasons changing—
we begin again
with grass.
Nine out of twelve days rain—
ground first to turn green
where an errant spark
blackened hillsides
three months back.
If only most of man’s mistakes
could be as easily erased
by just adding water
to all the bad actors
and their political stage plays.
Robbin caught these little fellas with her cellphone while we were putting the bulls out on Tuesday between rains.
There are no dreams like this:
old man learning to go slow
without coming to a stop—
hand let run the smooth flesh
of a time and weather-worn
corral-board table top, sanded
and shellacked, splinters sealed
beneath to become functional.
Scars and crooked fingers trace
the deep grain without calloused
insulation, a new sensation saved
for thin skin that bruises easily.
There are no dreams like this
for whip and spur youth, wide loops
and inflated heroics—yahoo mugs
raised to the wild, to the heavens
howling late into black night
when once I was among them.
The truth is at your feet,
the wet or dry of dirt
beyond concrete and asphalt—
the rock’s slow erosion,
the past that holds you up
and feeds your flesh
before it owns you
with all the tiny worlds
busy sustaining themselves
and one another.
Words skirt around the facts
and eventually evaporate
into a meaningless vapor
we exhale, distilled slogans
casually consumed
as shortcuts to nirvana—
the rhymed and tuned
hackneyed mantras
with which we work
beneath our breath.
Look to the ridgeline
that cuts the sky
that holds the storms
we can’t deny—
to the heavens
where gods and goddesses
decide what’s best—
no better place
to rest your mind
with open eyes.
Over an inch of rain, fire in the wood stove, soup on the stove, calves on the ground, family and friends, we have much to be thankful for.
drycrikjournal 