Tag Archives: poetry

@ 70, you try
to save steps, weigh
pick ups and deliveries
against carrying capacity
and memory hoping
not to forget
the grand plan
along the way—only
to find repetition
a good mental and physical
exercise in reality,
like it or not.

Shuffling his Florsheim wingtips
towards the hospital doors,
my father quipped, “A man has to
               get used to being
               not first in line.”

Change has not run off
and left us without humor,
without our backwards perspective
and subsequent syntax,
but thinking too far ahead
to save time, to insure
efficiency, we may miss
the moments we have
chosen to live for.

Where the creek stops in moss-laden pools
miles above the Kaweah in August, wild hens
collect with half-grown poults scratching for seeds

and bugs—aware, but not caring. I whistle
for a gobble as they drift off into the brush
as I have, into the canyons of lichened rock,

the Live Oak and Chamise. I am native
here, apart from where I came to forget
the blunderbuss of duplicity.

I came to be refreshed by the unafraid,
by the innocent and self-reliant—
I came to bring some home with me.

Mind gone blank: Zen empty
across the creek gone dry,
shadows stretching over long blond feed,

first-calf heifers coming out from under
shade to water for an evening’s graze.
It’s all the mind I need.

The news rains off my shoulders.
Even the eclipse didn’t faze me,
but for the fuzziness in my gut.

For a moment, it worried me—
so disconnected to the periphery
I had no need for poetry—

no need for anything but to breathe,
to inhale and cleanse the flesh
as it melts into the gloaming.

Robbin, July 2011

The answer in art appeals,
resides within, not without.
It adds, it multiplies

boundlessly: fresh, unnamed
senses like ripples from a pebble
spreading across pools

we harbor in our hearts
apart from politics,
from the legions of agendas

to satisfy the appetites
of power and greed
where might is right.

Art is not correct
and never stays the same,
illusive as the canyon wren’s

cascading song—I hear it now
again for the first time:
bear clover forever stirred

in memory miles away
in time and distance
trout fishing as a boy.