Tag Archives: wildlife

LIKE OWLS

Posted on January 14, 2015 by John | 5 comments

of this dirt
we burrow deeper into our shells
waiting for a rain.

5 Comments

Posted in Haiku 2015, Photographs, Ranch Journal

Tagged birds, Burrowing Owls, Drought, Dry Creek, haiku, photographs, poetry, weather, wildlife

LEAVING WITH STAFFORD

Posted on January 12, 2015 by John | 6 comments

http://www.williamstaffordarchives.org

I imagine that the young men
I went to school with have retired
by now, given up their desks
for free-wheeling possibilities

to coast downhill grades, collecting
their rewards and all the promises made
to themselves, over and over again.
I truly wish them all the best.

And I suspect the girls have become
wise grandmothers with practical advice,
keeping secrets in ceramic cookie jars
with noisy lids like I remember.

Leaving with Stafford, I retire
from a world too large to digest,
and go to that far place for the familiar
sign, those recognizable tracks

where wild makes sense of circumstance.
We are collecting short stories
like mushrooms in wicker baskets
before they fade and melt into the ground,

discussing how we’ll sauté them over fire
in butter and garlic to melt in our mouths
instead. Already we can feel their wild
flavor rage in our veins, like venison,

as we shed the old flesh, find keen eyes.
All the ghosts will rise beneath the stars
to gather at our fire, faces flickering
in the darkness to share the light.

6 Comments

Posted in Poems 2015

Tagged age, Fire, poetry, retire, venison, wild, wild mushrooms, wildlife, William Stafford

PILLOWED CLOUDS

Posted on January 8, 2015 by John | 8 comments

I used to think that inside the deep heart
of the world gone wild, that we all wanted,
craved, needed, or would acquiesce to,

                         a yet to be identified
                         common soul:
                         a ‘peace and love’ tranquility
                         where we all got along
                         with our dreams—

a musical, moaning chorus of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’
that kept us busy feeling fine as frog hair,
trying harder to make life better for everyone.

But how could heaven’s everlasting light
be so great without a dark side, without the moon
rising in new places dressed in different phases
behind the skeletons of oak and tops of pine?

                         Rain and storm for free.
                         Life from dust, the miracle
                         of green reaching up
                         to seed itself
                         against adversity

should be enough to brave the skullduggery
of all the power-hungry opportunists that slink
and lurk in the shadows. And what of poetry
rooted in the illusion of pillowed clouds?

8 Comments

Posted in Photographs, Poems 2015

Tagged clouds, dark, grass, photographs, poetry, rain, seed, storm, the deep heart of the world gone wild, water, weather, wildlife

LIKE THE COYOTE

Posted on January 5, 2015 by John | 6 comments

We, like the coyote, think
we know the habits of this world:
death and taxes with certain diversions

that make predictable politics
like foreplay for Wall Street
eager to screw the future

into submission. Coyotes
make their living on the details
overlooked and discarded,

keeping to the periphery
and singing into darkness
while everyone’s asleep.

6 Comments

Posted in Poems 2015

Tagged coyote, poetry, politics, Wall Street, wildlife

SABBATH HOME

Posted on January 4, 2015 by John | 8 comments

1.
After the flood of holiday cheer
and four black and frosty mornings
into the New Year, I have lost track
of the names of days

                        celebrating work:
                        friends gathered,
                        calves branded,
                        meat fired

                        and bottles emptied—
                        the hugs and handshakes
                        of neighbors, persistent
                        habits etched deeper

                        in the hard ground
                        worn around our eyes—
                        deeper yet into souls,
                        our pupils as pinholes

                        to grand landscapes
                        either side, missed
                        by the migratory headed
                        somewhere up the road.

2.
We live within a dot on the map,
a speck of dust on a spinning globe
in space and time without end,

holding firm to our moment,
looking back and ahead at once:
no finish line in sight.

3.
We pace our plodding, take all week
to get the work done, to savor details
of small accomplishment in a hazy

scheme of keeping track of seasons
shaped by rain, or lack of it—
our spiritual sustenance comes

with the crescendo of storms
we pray for, almost everyday, keeping
busy while we wait for an answer.

4.
In the winter, we invest in the future
measured by firewood stacked outside
the door, like last year’s crop of acorns
stored by natives, wild and domestic,

we are prepared in this place
to loose track of days scattered
like native cattle into strays
chasing the good grass back home.

8 Comments

Posted in Poems 2015, Ranch Journal

Tagged branding, Calves, cows, Drought, Dry Creek, Fire, Home, neighbors, photographs, poetry, rain, Sabbath, water, weather, wildlife

COLD MORNING

Posted on January 1, 2015 by John | 2 comments

I find my friend hunting
on my way to cut wood
for a branding fire.

2 Comments

Posted in Haiku 2015, Photographs

Tagged birds, branding, Burrowing Owl, Calves, Dry Creek, haiku, photographs, poetry, wildlife

ADIOS TWO-FOURTEEN

Posted on December 31, 2014 by John | 8 comments

If it is Apollo’s steeds chomping at silver bits
I hear behind the ridge, eager to tow the sun,
bring the light like any other day, the future

to this cold, dark canyon—the last of the old load
of days to be dropped off before the New Year—
I’m ready early, hacking my last goodbyes

on paper, screening blessings from the dust
and drought behind me, I trust, having measured-up
to something I can’t see, head bowed, dragging

my feet in yesterday. We must lean into our collars,
move the wheel into new country, scatter virtue
like vigorous seed and hope for a bumper crop.

8 Comments

Posted in Poems 2014, Ranch Journal

Tagged 2014, Drought, Dry Creek, New Year, poetry, rain, water, weather, wildflowers, wildlife

1958

Posted on December 30, 2014 by John | 10 comments

Exploring with a gun alone, oak trees
spoke to me—Red Tails swooped
to the wounded and buzzards trailed

at a safe distance when I was ten—
half-wild, I thought, circumambulating
the endless draws and canyons that called

for company and conversation—shooting
squirrels and hunting rattlesnakes in rock piles.
They would have jailed my folks today.

The first butterfly I saw batted by a bobcat
played better than Walt Disney, better than
the Space Race, Cold War or Sputnik.

10 Comments

Posted in Poems 2014

Tagged birds, Blue Oak, Boy, Dry Creek, guns, hills, Kaweah, poetry, wildlife, youth

WITH EASE

Posted on December 23, 2014 by John | 7 comments

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.