All the places
I worked and played
too hard
are wearing on me
for this moment
I have trailed
with discarded rhymes
and poetry
even I don’t quite
understand
why I had to kiss
the wild so deeply,
why I had to walk
the fence
and dream beyond
the barbed wire.
Posted in Deck Poems, Photographs, Poems 2024, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged age, photography, poetry
Occasionally, neighbors become good friends,
and so it’s been with Steve and Jody Fuller, Robbin and I.
I am going to read a short poem that I wrote for them
when my mother was dying in the hospital back in 2010.
LAST NIGHT’S LEFTOVERS
We pray for heart attacks, Mack trucks and lightening
as our way out, trading tales of die-hard mothers
like rattlesnake stories, each triggering another –
pouring wine with whiskey rants to laugh
at the sad truth we can’t improve, can’t make easier,
can’t change, but in ourselves. Out of the rain,
my great bay horse, a bag of bones at thirty,
paws the gate in the barn for more grain – an indignant
impatience I trained for years, my mother’s hands
in mine again. It’s rained five days straight,
blew the barn down, blew a tire in a rockslide,
got a ticket parked too long at the hospital,
and we look up into the gray wanting to escape
town and traffic, find home and recuperate
with neighbors and last night’s leftovers.
– for Steve & Jody
Steve left his mark on the hearts of us all.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2010, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged Dry Creek, photography, poetry
Yesterday’s rain
runs in rivulets
towards the creek
across the shoulder
of the road
and growing traffic—
Pond Turtle shell
glistening still
with all the wild
totems we lay claim to
in our joint accounts.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2024, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged Dry Creek, photography, poetry, POND TURTLE, rain, TOTEMS
Mud from head to toe
before the bus to school,
how could I know
I’d never bring it home—
never be the hero
of black and white westerns.
But a lifetime chasing rainbows
has been enough
without the pot of gold.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2024, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged Dry Creek, photography, poetry, rain, rainbows, weather
Despite the advance of new scientific instruments utilized for weather modeling, this year’s Atmospheric River phenomenon for Central California hasn’t followed predictions. However, we have enjoyed beautiful weather and average rainfall standing currently at 10 inches with March and April yet to go. Last summer seemed cooler, fall and winter warmer with yesterday’s high reaching 71 degrees.
Robbin snapped this photo about the time the deluge was forecast to arrive yesterday evening, but it didn’t start raining until 3:00 this morning. I love the rainy days, almost always smug when the experts are wrong.
Posted in Photographs, Ranch Journal
Tagged Atmospheric Rivers, forecasting, photography, rain, weather
Arms shrunk to seal flippers
Charred buttocks thrust skyward
They burned for five days.
– Bill Jones (“The Body Burning Detail”)
The tangle of limbs piled
like Bill’s poem from Nam,
oak skeletons and cadavers
turned hard and brittle
ache from drought,
rings parched of memory,
native history become ash
up in smoke. Perhaps my years
personify the tree, allow
empathy for these witnesses
to wild centuries before the West
was tamed, offering acorn meal
and shade for cattle,
ever-tuned to the telepathic
as they chew their cuds.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2024, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged "Blood Trails", burn piles, dead standing oaks, Drought, Dry Creek, Fire, personification, photography, poetry
Flash after flash above
a steely barrage of pellets—
an opaque torrent of gray rain
cut by the crack of thunder
as if the gods were falling timber
or sawing logs—
or just inebriated
in the mountains
playing nine pins.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2024, Ranch Journal
Tagged Atmospheric River, Dry Creek, lightning, photography, Pineapple Express, poetry, rain, thunder, weather
With a couple of “burn days” between rain showers this week, we’ve lit the piles of debris and deadfall that settled here where the canyon widens that were brought down with last spring’s atmospheric rivers. With air quality a concern in the San Joaquin Valley, burn days can be hard to come by. Not only are we reducing hazardous fuel in the event of a wildfire, but eliminating the limbs, mostly sycamore that burn quickly compared to oak, we saved our watergap fences between pastures and neighbors when Dry Creek rises again. Lastly, we’ve eliminated a potential logjam at McKay’s Point where part of the Kaweah River is diverted to the St. John’s fork that ultimately passes north of Visalia.
Posted in Photographs, Ranch Journal
Tagged Atmospheric Rivers, burn piles, debris and deadfall, photography, rain, weather
Beautiful day on Dry Creek, good friends, good help.
Caravans of SUVs, militarily spaced in case one gets lost,
race up our pocked-marked and decomposing mountain road
on Fridays to Hartland and Hume Lake Christian camps
to thin, clean air and worship exposed to cedars and pines
only to return Sunday afternoons as if God were driving
irresponsibly—an ascension of modern day crusaders
sprinting with a gang of jeeps, retrofitted for climbing rocks
and spinning hookers in the melting snow, the whir
and hum of mud-grips from miles below. Always
casualties, strapped to the backs of tow trucks home.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged Dry Creek, photography, poetry
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