Tag Archives: Robinson Jeffers

WITH EASE

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                                        Old violence is not too old to beget new values.
                                                            – Robinson Jeffers (“The Bloody Sire”)

With ease, we have evolved to softer versions
of ourselves—no longer lean, Dust Bowl men
in coveralls waiting for work and a weather change,

sinew no longer strained to stretch the harvest
of endless furrows. Within earshot of lamenting
old men leaning on fences, I was part of a future

doomed with easy-living, and so I have been
by comparison, yet with little time for visiting
face-to-face, eye-to-eye. We have become immune

to the violence next door, alive in cyberspace, and
deaf to war—the clash of sword-on-shield or bigger
better guns barking how to cull the herd—with ease,

we have evolved to envy dumb animals and birds
in touch with the sky, yearning for ignorance
and bliss. And all the old values now lost to youth.

 

Early Morning Writing

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Fellow blogger menomama3, Life in a Flash and Wuthering Bites, has asked that I share my writing process.

 

To begin with,

I get up early, my writing habit for years. It’s black outside except for one unobtrusive mercury vapor light at the horse barn, not a sound in the canyon. This is my time. No ringing phone, no demands from the outside world. My mind is fresh from whatever dream possessed it while I slept and relaxed. Often a dream lingers inexplicably, sometimes a day or two with vivid images and interactions or just a fog of feeling I can’t explain. But bottomline, my mind is all mine for a couple of hours.

Staring at a blank white sheet is not as intimidating as it used to be, and more often than not I already have a line strumming in my head, perhaps one garnered from my sleep. If not, because this is my discipline to write every morning, I have several collections from poets I admire on my desk that I may open randomly, and many on the shelf if the ones close at hand don’t help my inspiration.

In either event, the first line goes down. It may become the third line, last line, but in the process, that’s unimportant. By the third or fourth line of the first stanza, I’ll probably reorganize the first line anyway, or trash it altogether. I edit while I write, unlike many poets I know. My poetry is somewhat lyrical, and this jousting around in the first stanza or two, I think, is to set the meter or rhythm of the poem. I tend towards internal rhyme, it seems, and lean on it heavily to establish, or reestablish, meter.

I may approach the page with strong purpose, but most of the time I don’t know exactly where I’m going, and that’s the fun part. This grazing livestock culture relies heavily on metaphor, on personification, on anthropomorphic (new word, Suzanne?) explanations, and with that, a unique vernacular I also try to utilize in my poetry, as my own way of thinking.

I depend on details that I visualize to turn a line in a poem, a cause and effect, hands-on approach, and allow myself to feel the action, to become vulnerable and human, hoping to connect with readers beyond my world.

And why?

Reclusive by nature, the cattle culture has been under siege for generations. Hollywood has not helped our reputation, nor have a half-dozen well-meaning campaigns originating in town to oust us from the land, often in favor of development or other extractive industries. Our livelihoods are dependent on the renewable resource of grass. In it for the long term, we do everything we can to keep the ground, and our cattle, healthy. Land and cattle, we are one family, and that comes first.

Projects

come when time allows, I have several in my head: a chapbook with a working title of The Dry Years (surely to sell like hotcakes) and a perfect-bound, larger collection that will include the chap; also an eBook of photographs and haiku, when I can find a format as kind to the photographs as wordpress has been.

 

NEW FRONTIERS

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                               Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
                               Our God?

                                     – Robinson Jeffers (“The Excesses of God”)

A boy goes outside looking for adventure
on new ground, catching disappearing glimpses
of her skirts through the trees, and he is ready
to tame the West where there are no rules—
ready to leave his mark upon the landscape.

After a lifetime, all the hackneyed, black
and whited-hatted heroics sound like the same
song, boom or bust flashes in the pan
that end badly, sadly leaving her abandoned
flesh as landmarks in a state of disgrace.

An old man goes outside looking for other
frontiers to get lost within, to follow wild
details that teem with heart in all things—
hawk and stone, tree and grass—to be assured
of the rainbowed superfluousness of his God.

 

BURRO CREEK, RIO SAN PEDRO

This is far as I want to go.

                    A series of cascades beneath
                    each tiny pool, clinging
                    to mossy rocks to cast a fly—
                    to catch a Brown. Remember

when you knew, heard
danger whisper in your ear?
Is this where I’ve come to die
so young? It could have been

anyone, any time, looking down
a cliff at death, waiting for a slip—
this place we fished as boys,
miles upstream, leapfrogging
for first cast on fresh water.
We came home with trout
you had to eat on Fridays.

                    My topo map of gray matter
                    where the Middle Fork flows
                    on granite through cedars—
                    my metaphor for everything.

Jeffers had it right, you know:
‘Let Them Alone’. Leave them
to their solitary art. Only a few,
like Maya Angelou, can fly
and fish at the same time.

AT THE HEART OF THINGS

                                A rattlesnake coils among cold stones,
                                full of mice, waits for evening
                                when he will hunt again.

                                               – Linda M. Hasselstrom (“Morning News
                                                                    on Windbreak Road”)

No feast on Dry Creek, no dance among the trees –
no amount of words rhymed with earth will change
the arrogance of men primping in the light.

We do not breathe by their generosity, nor believe
they may, someday, be gods – saviors of a nation
always at war with what it can’t comprehend.

We have forgotten, perhaps we never heard
the silent mantra of the harvest strum in our heads –
hands busy, bodies bent, genuflecting in the dirt.

Or been of a tribe of men, women and communities
that still rise to raise a glass to that great expanse
that feeds us all we need, sparingly. Riding out

alone, do you remember conversations with living
and dead? Did you mark the granite outcrop,
hang words in an oak tree, or just let them loose

on a hawk’s wing? If only Jeffers’ perch-mates,
power and desire – not greed – might roost in
Washington, we’d dedicate his fountain to humanity.

*               *               *               *               *               *               *               *

As the dust settles, I am reminded of Andy Warhol’s famous ’15 minutes of fame’ quote in 1968 after the hullabaloo of the recent NY Times’ piece,
‘For Cowboy Poets, Unwelcome Spotlight in Battle Over Spending’
Dry Crik Journal received nearly 4,000 visits and 14 assorted comments in the 3 days following. Not unwelcome because that’s what we’ve been about here, sharing, trying to offer glimpses of a grounded way of life that we think consists of a bit more than what’s assumed by the majority. The referenced Robinson Jeffer’s poem: ‘THE EXCESSES OF GOD’ is worth a read, wonderfully applicable. Linda Hasselstrom’s poem is forthcoming from Dry Crik Review.

HOPE IS IN THE MOMENT

We are cast of stone, all kinds,
no two the same, amalgamations
worn by time’s erosion, by

wind, sun and rain – warming,
soothing, eating away towards
the core of our ultimate humility.

Even the lofty falcon’s perch,
gray-haired, exfoliates into the sea,
the Sierra’s teeth crumbling and

the cobble found to fit a hand
are finally sand, gravel for highways,
particles of dust stirred and inhaled

as strangers remembered, carried
in our chests. What do the eyes
truly see, searching for that mystic

connection of great and small, those
depths we explore where details meet
and fall in love, or lust, or like –

or as we gird for battle? Here,
in that moment there is no time
to relive the past or dream of some

future futility. The real action churns
with it all at once, in the current
like a river rushing, pooling, soaking

richly within us, before moving on.

ABOVE THE EDGE OF STEEP

A gray sea laps the foothills, fills the Valley, creates
islands of mountain tops above the muffled sounds
of humanity, we can’t see, moving along the road

below. The rumbling crush of rock, farther off,
where creek greets river, where diesel engines
load and groan to the highway running deeper

towards the flatlands into fog. Warm above the shoreline,
we squint into the sun as naked oaks washed in drifting
mists become submerged, reach-out crying for a hand

before the last limb is engulfed – and we become
Jeffers’ horsemen above the Coast Road, hooves wet
with green, listening to the busyness of progress

bubbling-up. I watched the silhouette of a man
swing a sledgehammer in the fog when I was young,
at the peak of his arc before the sound of his last blow

reached me – and so it is off these narrow ropes
of blacktop. We are that horseman’s children still
riding higher, climbing towards the clear and timeless,

where the voices before us can whisper in sleep,
where trees and rocks dance with hawks, and we
sing poetry around a fire above the edge of steep.