Frozen in the folds of time:
blue smoke, oak flames,
gathered neighbors fed
when the work was done.
For 90 years, Cutlers drove cattle
to Rowell Meadow until 1953—
everybody came for my mother’s
father’s whiskey, meat and beans.
To get along, we will forgive
our ill-behavior, overlook
our extravagances, but sadly
we will forget who we were.
It’s a dance—
concentrate and relax,
guide the feel
of your horse
with your legs, find
the feel of your rope
at your fingertips
swing in rhythm
with the calf.
Like everything else,
it’s a dance—just
concentrate and relax.
Fuller Branding, Dry Creek – December 15, 2018
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2018, Ranch Journal
Tagged branding, photography, poetry
Down the mountain, down
the four-wheel drive dirt track
to the asphalt that connects us
to home and families,
to basic urgencies far away
lost in time and space
beyond the whine of twine
around the heels of calves
stretched for branding—
when and where we are gods
for a moment, immune
to the insanities
of a civilized world.
All the old men gone
still lean against the boards.
I find my place among them,
whoop and illuminate
color with details,
hoping to see myself once more
stepping to the untamed rhythm
of heaven’s hoof dance.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2018
Tagged Blaine Ketscher, branding, Craig Ainley, photography, poetry, Shane Doering
It could have been dreams
in a young man’s sleep,
lightly listening for the bell mare
high in the granite scree
that glows under starlight—
a celestial showering
from a leaky bucket sky
that came over me
to be a cowboy.
I did it well-enough
to stay in the same place
to become a cowman.
But it could have happened
at a branding, watching good
young hands just come to help.
Photo credit: Audrey Maze
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2018, Ranch Journal
Tagged Blaine Ketscher, branding, photography, poetry, Shane Doering
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.
How I welcome winter now
as the sun slides south
towards Arizona,
towards old friends
that graze red rockpiles
we will meet in Nevada—
too far away to worry,
livestock on its own.
I can hear the harmonies
reverberate, cat gut
atop thin slices of spruce
from Canada—I feel
my heart lift away
from the maladies
our fears and guilt have made
insurmountable.
How I welcome winter’s
gathering, branding smoke
on weather-slick roads,
bull-stretched fences
and dear neighbors
gearing up-for one last holler
to all the gods
that have sustained us.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2018
Tagged Elko, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, photography, poetry
After a good rain, the cows have left
the feed grounds greening, grabbed their calves
and headed for the ridgetops where raindrops
slowly settled to weave fast growing
blades between the matted hollow stems
to make a mouthful, a musty bit of old
with the fresher taste of a new beginning.
We feel the same searching hillsides
for black dots of grazing pairs, oblivious
to the feed truck’s throaty idle,
way down in the flats, close to the hay barn,
now wearing a dark empty hole.
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.
drycrikjournal 