The weeks take wing and flutter
like coveys of quail to safety,
seasons spin into one another
as the dawn rides up and down,
north and south, upon the ridgeline,
never resting in the same place twice
no matter the year—this moment
unique. And these old eyes
still sharp at a distance, see more
than they used to—know the details
to look for. I am learning how
to talk with my eyes, conversations
accompanied with words:
reverberating murmurs in my chest
from a gentle land we understand.
Outside, the Maytag
wringer-washer chugged with diapers
to be hung on a rope line
from cedar to pine.
Inside, you could see out
through bat and board cracks
after the war and Relocation Camps
your family had come from,
you but a child holding my hand
afraid to let go
when the buzzing began
coiled on a rock.
You ran as fast as you could drag me
down a trail you don’t quite remember
sixty-five years later.
* * *
Robbin and I had the pleasure of coffee Sunday morning with Evelynne Watanabe Matsumoto and family. Evelynne babysat my sister and I, and initiated contact from Southern California a couple of years ago. Her letters have been delightful rememberances of her time in Exeter before heading off to UCLA to become a teacher, marry and raise a family. She told me that the $250 she saved from babysitting paid two years tuition in those days.
Matthew Ormseth Photo
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2016, Ranch Journal
Tagged Evelynne Watanabe Matsumoto, local history, photography, poetry
It could be anytime past
that you brought back
and left to us
incubating hundreds
of turkey eggs,
illegally eliminating
as many predators
to keep a few alive
to become ‘street smart—’
at home in the wild.
You made the rules
you lived by
surviving yet beyond
your fences, ever
since you’ve been gone.
for Gary Davis
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2016, Ranch Journal
Tagged photography, poetry, wild turkeys
It could be anything
at a distance, a shape
or silhouette grazing
your memory, a word
kept to yourself
for safekeeping
now dim enough
to call instinct—
it needs no name.
Listen to the dogs
emulate symphonies
before daybreak,
stirred by the wild
curiosity that yet holds
them close to the house.
They have chosen
partnership, stayed awake
while you dreamed
poetry, wandered-off
on an adventure
you can’t quite remember,
edited so many times
it remains undone, loose
lines without ending.
It could be anything
to catch your eye
and hold it
at a distance,
if you’re looking,
if you listen.
The sun is bearing down upon your shade,
wearing brown the skin of crops you’ve made,
ain’t the way they say a man gets paid
farming from Washington D.C.
The sky is white on the other side of dust,
the tractor’s paint has given into rust,
you pray much less than you have cussed
farming from Washington D.C.
You believe in rain before your God
to fill the furrows cut deep into your sod—
old flesh follows seasons—on you plod
farming from Washington D.C.
The song you hear rattles in your head,
in the movies played when you fall to bed:
who will feed the town when you are dead
farming from Washington D.C.?
No fanfare here, no trumpet’s blare
before day breaks the ridgeline,
no attaboys, no outside noise
to diffuse the summertime,
no accolades but breeze and shade
within short circles lined
with water here and dry feed there,
and a trail of dust behind.
Like cattle
we plod
the heat,
mesmerized
by the rhythm
of our feet
leaning
towards evening’s
G & T.
October 29, 2015
There is much to envy
cows content with fate,
grass at their feet, shade,
water, friends close—
no one preaches more
nor promises relief.
They’ve left irrigated
green for dry ground,
tall, brittle stems
fold beneath bellies
growing with calves
for the first time.
Under sycamores,
112° churns,
burns on a breeze
out of the south,
too hot to find
the open gates
to their new home
as mothers nursing
new life, new love,
devotion on the fight.
There is a place they go
if need be: head low,
blood in their eye,
red swirls in brown
pulsing towards crimson.
They will learn
to bellow and bawl,
shake and salivate
and come to the call
of others, like family,
within 45 days, well
before the vote
and victory dances
beyond this world.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2016, Ranch Journal
Tagged first-calf heifers, photography, poetry
Everyone out early in the heat
before the earth is too hot to touch,
a Grackle shakes the last drops
of a morning bath to preen
and quickly drip-dry upon a rock.
Time essential, we squeeze the work
beneath the angle of a risen sun
that by ten bakes all living things.
Everyone out early when we meet.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2016, Ranch Journal
Tagged Great-tailed Grackle, photography, poetry
Sometimes they come to take a look,
glide in low with all their tools
from a bare oak branch to see just who
spoiled the plan to dine on squirrel
straying too far from its earthen burrow—
and perhaps too, to take a moment
to deliver their displeasure, face-to face,
eye-to-eye, to make sure you know
that you screwed up.
It may be possible
upon reflection
after a wet spring,
mottled sun beneath
the canopy of sycamores
standing, frozen still
upon black water.
The sloshing sound
of my wet feet
not ready to walk
to Canada,
leave the creek
and family behind,
become outlaw
in their mind.
It may be possible
to fill those channels
again, rain until
the road flows by.
And when the earth
is full, excess standing,
I may look down
upon heaven’s clouds
with no direction.
After the odyssey in Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain” and Leonard Durso’s poem “a thousand years ago on some coastline in the fall.”
drycrikjournal 