God created men and Sam Colt made them Equal.
– Old West Adage (March 5, 1836)
Gunslinger, quick draw myth we cherish,
the West is wound with dreams
come through the centuries like a mist
hanging on a bare branch, prismed droplets
clinging, sparkling with our inheritance—
now we are rich with missiles and rockets
aimed to kill and maim, to keep the peace
with fear in this overcrowded town—
the dark shroud that shields us equally.
All between a cow and daylight,
she broke your collarbone,
a long bumpy ride on a dirt road
to the asphalt, to Emergency—
and we sink pipe and steel
for tomorrow’s taste for beef.
It could be a moonscape,
bacon-frying buzz of welding rod,
family of oak trees frightened,
unable to run. Well-scattered
somewhere near, we will watch
the future learn to work together
in these corrals: cattle, horses,
men and women—branding calves
far-removed from this crazy world.
I graduated from the 60s
with a broken heart
for a world at war,
but I had known love
and lust and peace
were easy to come by—
and with my anger
dug postholes deep,
tamped railroad ties
to last a lifetime
holding barbed wire up
tuned guitar tight.
Rusty fences sag
and leak in places now,
braces lean with
the constant conflicts
beyond these pastures—
none so sure or secure.
Yellow daffodils
clumped like campfires
on gray days,
gopher snake sunning
in a dirt road,
no snow in Elko,
no rain at home—
‘Climate change,’ you say,
‘is tree hugger poppycock
leveraged to slow production
and change our ways.’
White-limbed buckeyes
feathered in tender green,
turkey hens leaving sororities
cruising the creek to nest
adapt to the propaganda
as we scuttle normal
with options for cattle
without rain, grass to graze.
Nothing stays the same, only
nothing—the wild balance
scrambles for survival.
Living on the road my friend,
Is gonna keep you free and clean
Townes Van Zandt (“Poncho and Lefty”)
Early morning south of Bishop,
US 395 at seventy, murders
of crows or ravens like old men
gathered at the coffee shop
lift from a smear of hair
imbedded in the asphalt.
How the jack rabbit
laid his ears back,
found another gear!
The early birds get the night kill
living on and off the road.
O’ Darwin, how could you know?
Around me, wild shapes and sounds
alive—some begging rain, some
angling for continued dry—and I,
these old bones and softening flesh,
stand ready for the worst of it
as January green turns gray.
Beside sun-glint spirals, long chrome
lug nuts spinning, Mack truck rumbling
off Tehachapi into an exhaust cloud
trapped at the end of the San Joaquin,
we submerge like aquatic bugs
beneath the moss of a water trough
as we listen to the chattering news:
the muffled lines of script
for the multi-dramas beyond us.
We have been away and forgotten
what home looks like, what fence
beneath drought-killed oaks
needs attention first, which cows
most need hay—a murky purpose,
but we are ready for the worst of it.
I still remember
spring Sunday mornings
rustling covers and dreams awake—
“Great day,” he’d say,
“for the race,” emphatically—
as if we knew.
This cheery departure
for our father waving
at dawn streaming
from the Kaweah peaks
to mottled cottonwoods
along the river,
its glistening steam
rising into the light
had to be special.
“What race?”
I begged an answer.
“The human race,”
he’d say.
I hope that the weathered horseman up yonder
Will die before he knows what this eager world
will do to his children.
-Robinson Jeffers (“The Coast-Road”)
I wonder now if Jeffers grins up yonder
with his horseman looking down
at the bluff-chiseled road they cursed
in the building, failing once again,
cut and fill slipping into the Pacific
after fire and 83 inches of rain.
Damage done, where have his children
gone to join the present, to succumb
to the latest newness man has wrought
to sell as necessary convenience?
Moving mudslides have closed the road
to the outside world to heal in private,
to rejuvenate the majestic ruggedness—
the awe and respect for the weather-carved
shaping always the character of man.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2018
Tagged Bixby Creek Bridge, photography, poetry, Robinson Jeffers, The Coast Road
Tree and stone, earth and grass,
among them we must ask,
‘what is our place, what is our task?’
Stumblebums, we lack the bounding grace
of deer, the keening hawk, the tree limb
turned by wind and sun—we detract,
I fear, so out of touch, so out of step
in the earnest dance around us.
Stepping lightly as a boy in US Keds,
gun in hand, I left my marks for dead
that fed the buzzards trailing me
in thermal glide, for Red Tails watching
from the oak tops for the wounded,
for the cripples crawling desperately—
and I thought I’d found my place
where the wild could reason
and adapt to trust and think
enough of me to follow closely.
Riding the High Country as a boy,
I fished snowmelt lakes
beneath sharp peaks of scree,
found clarity around a fire,
played dot-to-dot with stars,
and dreamed on hard ground
that I’d awake unscathed,
but for my craving for space
beyond the hand of man.
A lifetime addiction,
betting on the weather
and a herd of cows grazing
foothills below, we wager
borrowed money, but don’t know
how to quit gambling
with the market and the politics
this close to heaven—we’ll
role the dice until we’re gone.
drycrikjournal 