Too many years courting goddesses,
genuflecting at the foot of ridgetops:
oak trees sharp and close enough to touch
to beg relief—to even entertain
such shameful blasphemy, such
feeble will to forever lose their ear.
Every river canyon churns to fill
and spill its reservoirs, white-capped
Sierras stacked with two-year’s snowpack
awaiting summer’s melt to flood the flats
and yet I can’t concede what is not me:
always ready, waiting for a good-hard rain.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023, poetry, Ranch Journal
Tagged dams, flood, photography, poetry, prayer, rain, rain goddess, rivers, snow, weather
Midday siesta, I dream of water running
down the Tule, ouzels dipping, or
beer cooling in an eddy on the Kern—
of you and I, our faces streaked with rain
as if we were crying—love in our eyes.
All the mud-stuck trucks, leap-frogging,
winches whining as the clouds cracked,
bursting with more of the same.
>
What else can we look forward to
this afternoon, inches from the Solstice,
what else can we do but dream? The air
is thin and burns the lungs. Leaves curl
in the garden while cows commiserate
in the shade of sycamores and oaks,
all their stories stored within rings,
chatter from the good old days.
>
And what of native wisdom banked
in their massive trunks, or smooth gossip rocks
in the living Live Oak shade? All the secrets
we have lost to progress, all the important
unimportant things that have not saved time,
but accelerated it and our poor hearts
just trying to keep up. 110 degrees at noon,
what else can we do but dream?
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2021, Ranch Journal
Tagged dream, heat, progress, rivers, siesta, tree rings, water, wisdom
December 10, 2015
1.
Small at first, rivers spill
High Sierra snowmelt,
water pure as it will ever be
falling to the call of gravity
and time’s relentless roar
over granite smooth, worn
by cataracts and cascades
dressed in rainbow mists
ascending to the whispers
among a million pines—
a timbered mat of arrows
headed to the sky.
2.
We have been there
in our perfect innocence
before our courses
changed the world
as it changed us.
I think it was the waiting
for the war I never served
that made me see that
spilling the blood of boys
could not kill ideas
or forever eliminate
a differing philosophy.
3.
Like water pooled
I am damned again
in someone else’s business
at the whims of men
I’ll never understand
beyond their lust for power
and their addiction to greed
while dancing to the tune
of men and women working
with their heads and hands.
I stay the slope and cling
to the sound of the river
chasing lyrics on paper
since the war—poor poetry
released like mist ascending
to the muse that must
report my plodding progress
to goddesses and gods.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2016
Tagged mountains, photography, poetry, red sky, rivers, water
A man gives up early in the summer,
too warm for wine, too hot for evening
poetry to endure, before darkness closes
the oven doors to bake in the black.
The Kings River calls, trout singing
from the riffles, asking why, when
trails of natives and early settlers rise
into the mountains, spread like webs
into the pine cabins and camps
beside the mantra of running water
through the night. I go early to bed
to get there in my dreams.
Posted in Poems 2015
Tagged "Mountains and Rivers Without End", heat, mountains, rivers, summer, weather
(click)
drycrikjournal 