courtesy: Wikipedia
My black and white
horseback heroes
still shoot it out,
subdue evil,
herk and jerk to leave
the hitching rack—
the Westerns Channel
as I lay down
to take a nap,
now knowing how
each episode
always ends—
familiar voices
comfort me
to believe the West
is wild and safe
from all the mean
and greedy men
we’ve seen since—
a lullaby guaranteed
for sleep.
Two weeks into weaning,
we celebrate real progress,
the gather, sort and haul—
the harvest down deep-rutted
dirt tracks, 4-wheel drive,
low-range gooseneck tow,
bawling calves to the asphalt—
our early peach
tequila margarita,
just-picked berry
and last season’s lime
juice frozen into a star.
Blank page and pencil,
this year rattles
everywhere we go.
We begin to gather
all the good news
showered upon us
from the sky,
harvest the grass
in the flesh of calves,
and like every year
we will weigh them,
measure our good fortune
with a number
to judge a season by.
We will turn the cows out
back to grass, back to homes
they’ve made on ground
good for little else
but wildlife—four-month
vacation with the girls
gossiping in the shade
without bulls
or nagging children
to disturb them.
Not a bad life
when it rains.
Cultivating a native life,
we pause for totems,
let them tell us
what they think—
who they are.
Some count on us
to stir the grass
and follow,
and some to listen
when we drink
coffee or wine
outside.
Claiming the roost
of loving crow mates,
a Golden Eagle lights
for a closer look at us—
and we are blessed.
Finding his feather
left ahead,
we believe
in something
more common
of the wild,
of talismans
from moments
we never forget
and hope to leave
as much.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2016, Ranch Journal
Tagged Golden Eagle, photography, poetry, TALISMANS, TOTEMS
Photo: Terri Drewry
In a world tall with grasses,
wild oats and rosy thatches
of dry filaree, we seldom see
our feet upon the earth.
In frequented places
like water troughs and barns,
like vegetable gardens
saving trips to town,
we are prejudiced—
react without a thought
against a race of snakes
that want no trouble
to claim the space
in which we travel
with a shovel.
for Terri
At their feet, I must leave home—
the house, the canyon, to see them.
At the overpass between Exeter
and Visalia, when at cloudy dawn
they became my mother’s rumpled
bedclothes as she courted death,
the Sierras cloaked in a gossamer mist
that embraced me. Or just south
of Lemon Cove, up the Kaweah’s long,
open throat, sharp-toothed peaks
of granite scree reach for the sky,
changing moods in every light.
A man must have mountains
to shed the nonsense to get to—
a distant and steep ascent
for the spirit, soul and flesh—
a place safe to wander fire to fire,
star to star, to drink from snowmelt.
Wide arms open, they welcome me
as I come home from town
to lay down at their wrinkled feet.
Long stiff with the sweat of years,
I see myself beneath its dust, retired
from the common ignorance of haste.
All the timed events, all the wild cattle
made by the chase are scars etched
in fragile leather, some in my brain
as sweet memories of riding high,
shoulder to shoulder in the gather
of good men shaped by this landscape
that will outlast us in the end. Too soon
old, they say, too late wise, I could
always have taken better care of time,
thrown away the watches and clocks
and invested it in the real observation
of other living things—even the smallest
of which has a mission to teach us
the hard way. And what I fail to see—
this slow creak of bones will illuminate.
If you are a fish
you find an eddy
behind a boulder
or a cutbank
shadowed
by a tree root
where Snallygasters
ride the current
snowmelt.
We swim upstream
for the perfect place
to make our livings—
where rivers start
close to the stars,
deep in the pines,
where water falls
fast and cold
all year long—
but always swimming
against the flow
just to hold our own.
Muggy morning beneath a raft of clouds
docked against the Sierras steals molecules
of oxygen beside the last hole dug for granddad’s
gravel that now traps tailwater from the pasture
in the summer, its dark, stagnant pool teams
with amoeba and paramecium, a fermenting
stench swum only by cormorants and mud hens.
Sweet fragrance on a gust startles my senses
to search the dry grass for color, tree limbs
for blossoms from willow to sycamore,
blackberry to cottonwood, but none in flower
before the forecast Mother’s Day thunderstorms.
Perfumed tendrils cling like Christmas lights
from branches and I am drenched, taste damp
sweetness as I become wild grapes in bloom.
In the cattails, long leaves
like a thatch of swords
after a war, hem the water in—
veil the mud hens putzing
close to shore where bullfrogs
freeze in the sun
waiting for something good
to come along this irrigation pond
trying to go wild. I have come
to love their god-awful birdsong
like rusty hinges on a pipe gate
yodeling in the tight places,
musical cascades turned loose
to lyrics I still don’t understand.
I say I think they’re courting
because its spring, because
you and I have stopped
to watch them sing.
drycrikjournal 