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It was 110 degrees when we passed the Jack Ranch Café in Cholame last Sunday, heading for Cambria to celebrate Robbin’s birthday. The temperature began dropping in Paso Robles, but we were grinning ear to ear as we started down Green Canyon into a lovely sea of fog where the car’s thermometer finally settled on 61. Less than three hours from home, it was a luxury to have nothing to do but eat, read and sleep.
Summer white skies, clean sheets
of paper dreams listening for words
to rise over the Sierras, to slip
between the peaks and tumble down
canyons to settle in the sycamores –
like cattle, like the deer and elk
before us, to find a soft, sandy bed
in the shade. Reaching deeply into
dawn’s cool silence, I wait for a sign
of migration off blond hillsides,
for the sound of the first word
that gathers others, hearing only
the occasional and irregular tempo
of steel-shod hooves upon mangers –
saddle horses hoping for alfalfa hay
and a day off to write poetry. Long
heads listening in the labial folds
of granite rock, where they say
women were drawn by the moon -
where fine dirt and forgotten words
mix and stir beneath their feet.
Snow
takes her print, curved half moons
cut by the heat of childhood in skin.
- Deborah Miranda (“Petroglyph”)
A man must be careful
telling stories with the
same tone and ending.
Young men tire
with expected heroics
stretched into legends,
with the old and dead
stars too far gone
to muster much twinkling.
On the other side
of the sun, the earth
waits to be reborn
under rain and snow.
Always the other side
to begin again, again –
yet a man must be
careful telling stories
that never change.
June 17, 2009
With nearly an inch of rain two weeks ago, green has germinated in the sand and silt beneath the sycamores along Dry Creek. The grass won’t last long as the temperature hit 100 degrees yesterday. The unusual continues after the strange weather of May and June, demonstrating that anything can happen in California, and that ‘only fools and newcomers dare predict the weather’ here.
Though the everyday pace of the past six weeks seems to be our mantra, we’ve finished weaning with only our heifers left to process. Thirty days ahead of last year, we’ve listed our steers on the Internet in a softer market, hoping to save our irrigated pasture for our heifers to keep as replacements and/or sell this fall. Not looking forward to the high temperatures to come, at least the days will be getting shorter.
Lost in Sulphur, small bunch
of young, third-calf cows
driven up-canyon to water –
sleek black hides snaking
a long tunnel of sycamores,
gray trunks and limbs reaching
out of a steep ravine, arched
and collapsing towards the light.
Through new eyes we explore
half-hearted notions up narrow
draws, deadfall detours that go
nowhere – learned on the way.
They begin to trust our low
grunts and groans of disapproval
to guide them, that punctuate
our conversation trailing behind.
The pause and wait as horses
watch, we become one calm
movement up and out of this
deep crevasse beneath a peak
above Ragle Springs leaking
into a moss-covered pond.
Hawks glide ahead and circle
back as if we were nothing.
of towering sunflowers, an easy
walk on gravel by raised beds
of silt and manure tilled by hand,
weeded and seeded into a green
meander between stacked cedar
logs leftover from the house.
Skid-steer buckets up the slope
from where floods meet clay
above the creek – tiny flecks
of old mountains mixed and left.
It all took time. Each in our zone
when Joe died, we kept his ashes
close before finding a ridge
where we could feel him
working in the garden.
Common Gourd ( Wild Gourd, Buffalo Gourd, Calabazilla)
Dry Creek
June 13, 2009
Early Spanish Californians called it 'chili coyote'.
Native uses: The roots were crushed and mixed with the pith of the fruit for soap to wash clothes. The seeds were crushed and eaten. Portions of the gourd were made into a strong purge, an overdose of which could prove fatal. A tea was made to address bloat and worms in horses. Dried gourds were used as rattles in native dances.
Common Gourd ( Wild Gourd, Buffalo Gourd, Calabazilla)
Dry Creek
June 19, 2009
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