Tag Archives: photography

The Valley fog has risen
to high-ground hillsides
leaving light on peaks,

warm islands enflamed
to cord limb wood
for branding and cook fires,

and a load of Manzanita
through a layer of gray
to the woodstove below—

as the generator pumps
tank and troughs full.
Up here, we’ve been rained

and snowed upon,
sorted cows from calves
in fog so thick

you couldn’t see
across the corral.
Up here, you brand

as soon as you can
with a crew of neighbors
who’ve been here before.

I am still not well, but contemplating the chill wind
and my energy-level knowing that if I cut another Kubota-load
of drought-killed oak, limb wood with loosened bark
likely to shed chunks on the carpet on the way to the stove,
I’d feel better—that luxury of choosing what old men want
to do. How I’ve yearned for this status, newly claimed without
a feather-weight of guilt. Calcium clod stuck in my gut
surging with pain and infection, I think about giving-in,
giving-up until the morphine lifts me to unreality, but
before the Norco illuminates dreams of a partial silhouette
chiseled in stone in the paddock behind my hospital bed
while it grows a second head upon a dark Ongole idol,
ears and nose appearing where the tail once was.
I am scared awake to withdraw from this primal energy,
imagery lying deep within my fragile, disconnected
psyche—not knowing, not caring what any of it means.

A little snow up the draw
beyond our foothill ridges
stuck on Redwood Mountain

and I imagine quail
puffed-up in the bare spots,
on fractured rounded rocks

with dull moss, motionless,
plump little generals
braced against the cold.

It is so easy now to escape
the pain of hopeless human
matters, of tyrants, despots

and the deranged waiting
to fill the next breach
in time. Perhaps a precursor

to senility, I practice slipping
              out of formation
to draw upon a different truth.

End and beginning
punctuated by a puddled rain
and a fiery flash of leaves—

by the green along the road
and beneath the old blond feed
done for another season.

The cows and calves have left
the feed grounds for the ridges,
mud soft between their toes—

they have told us everything
we need to know. The bulls
at work, the ranch so close

to perfect, so predictable
for the next three weeks,
we want no where else to go.