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Escaped this morning to Greasy to look at our second-calf heifers due to calve in 30 or so days. Early morning cool, horses bucking and playing when I fed them, scent of fall on the grass, this weather change influenced by a high-pressure low off the coast and monsoon conditions in the Southwest. Thought we needed a picture to separate these damn poems.
Silver-lined thunderheads at dawn,
a sign banked for my myopia,
or the ambush crouched beyond
the mountains. Set afire, set adrift
ships leak west – runaway prairie
schooners cast across a purple sky
pursued by paint horses in my mind –
over the head of the watershed, a little
north of where I wait for another day
of 100 degrees in the shade. We feel
for a connection, for wild expression
as harbingers of hope for mankind,
and entertain the change in weather
that may save our children
from having to learn the hard way.
Drifting far from the main
we retreat to new movies in our dreams,
that illusion that we are central,
as individuals, in the survival of beings -
investing in empty games,
embracing moments with nothing to show
from our hands, hearts and intellect
except a greater distance from the whole,
we have become islands – even
as a tree frog clings to the door at dawn
on his swinging, perpendicular plane
after harvesting the glass and a light left on.
Our tracks from the dark thicket
have been erased. We are free to forget
where we come from, untied
to drift upon every sea of regret.
The sun slides within
a narrow plane between the eve
and the top of the ridge,
a blinding crack of light,
later now, moving north
towards Sulphur Peak,
sneaking north towards
shorter days, cooler nights –
towards less urgency
to saddle horses in the dark
where white-haired winter waits –
a frosty grin, a chance of rain.
Imagine the curiosity
that measured days off peaks
of pyramids, off spikes of stars,
tiny wedges of days
to make a moon, circling
full while Apollo rides
the ridge and back again,
again and again and again,
no matter the news.
Dirt lot six days a week,
pens empty five,
no place to park
among the pickups, goosenecks
and aluminum big rigs –
no stanchions for assorted sizes
waiting for a load of cows
bred up-close for
a seven hundred dollar calf
this time next year.
I hear my father in my head,
'When the parking lot’s full,
go home and bring a load to town,
but be buying when it’s empty -
the majority’s usually wrong.'
Dry Creek @ CDF Crossing
July 14, 2010
We Bangs vaccinated the heifers yesterday, shipping the steer calves early this a.m. Too hot to sleep, I included another photograph of Dry Creek just to feel cooler.
Western Morning Glory
Greasy Creek
July 14, 2010
I found quite a patch in the horse lot below Sulphur Spring, near where Earl McKee's folks had a cabin. He burnt it down years ago when his good stud found some squirrel poison that he had stored inside. Just Mornining Glory, now.
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