She looks into my eyes
exploring behind them
through darkened lenses—
caution and wonder wrinkle
her brow, she hesitates
to wander far.
Others graze the hay truck
like a manger as we stare
at open range
we share. Moments become
minutes, salutations
among hungry girls.
Your name was a song
on a young mother’s tongue
for many years after,
her diaphanous dream
of a world as it should be—
everlasting.
Chance or circumstance,
you bathed my naked flesh
with Japanese concepts
whispering yet. A soft
longing melody
on an old woman’s tongue.
for Evelynne Matsumoto
We hear way off approaching sounds
Of rain on leaves and on the river:
O blessed rain, bring up the grass
To the tongues of the hungry cattle.
– Wendell Berry (“Sabbaths 2000, VIII”)
Perhaps the old trees grounded in granite
feel it flutter first, out of the southwest—
or the windmill that never lied, spinning
pointing, pumping water. We await
the screaming crescendo of wind rising
on the corner of cedar log ends to be sure—
the Siren’s song that can draw dry souls
from the flesh to fly with the first drops
sounding on the roof, the leaves, the earth.
No finer miracle than that moist moment
of redemption, inhaled and absorbed at once,
bringing grass to the tongues of hungry cattle.
____________________________________________________
A ‘promising chance’ is bantered about among local news and weather commentators for next Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Hard pull on a slow Sabbath,
the gooseneck rattles over boulders
cobbled in the canyon bottom
beneath the torsos of sycamores—
long tunnel of bare white limbs
over the quiet stream and track up
to brand calves, four crow miles
and a hoard of long-gone faces
waiting to climb aboard
on each curve, in every draw.
Memories stacked like pages torn
from a bigger book, we inch
as fast as you can walk, you say
at 76, breaking a long pause
since someone’s last sentence.
This is not Nevada, yet
this wild canyon craves
the company of humans,
the chance to etch another rattle
in our machinery, in the minds
of this annual procession
of neighbors with other lives
during the week. This is not
church, but it could be heaven.
Posted in Poems 2014
Tagged Church, Craig Ainley Branding, East Fork Dry Creek, Mankins Flat, poetry, Sabbath
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