Buck Season Survivor
Sulphur
November 17, 2005
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Sulphur
November 17, 2005
Too much
of what I think I know
is like granite
rockpiles cracked
in a puzzled tumble �
shaped like something
sure and solid after
the earth left it
several thousand years ago
to multi-colored lichen,
and thick, velvet moss
to make a living.
But, I�ll take it
any day, any
fleeting time at all.
Good rain last night and early this a.m., more forecast on and off throughout the week with cooler temperatures.
Dry Creek: 1.0"
Greasy Creek: 1.0"
Paregien: 1.0"
Rainfall amounts in the hills either side of Dry Creek are generally greater than here at our 600 foot elevation. This year we placed gauges at the Greasy Creek corrals, 4 miles east of Dry Creek @ the 1600' elevation and at the Paregien corrals, 2 miles west of Dry Creek @ almost 1800' to quantify what we think we know. Of course the roads are too slick at the moment to get the data, but will be entered when we can get there.
Inclusion of any of this information may not be of particular interest to many, however, in this semi-arid region of California, any moisture and and its measurement becomes a fairly big deal. At the very least, logging it here keeps it accessible to us.
Still in the 70's. Light shower last night.
Dry Creek: .02
Greasy Creek: .02
Paregien: .02
Day�s cattle work done, we sip December
beer to recount the numbers onto paper
lest we forget to search acres of future
for one or two that were never there.
My eyes comb gray, old feed over green,
half-way up the ridge across the canyon
where the three of us scattered your father �
forked his urn in a good Blue Oak.
Hiroshima, Miramar, Kwadjalein � a sailor�s
wake of mushroom clouds and radiation
across the Pacific to where my eyes stray
to rest � find reason where there was none.
Next year�s new mothers put out today
will gravitate and graze this spot soon �
dot dawns and evenings until they calve
and calve again, until we too are gone.
Winter Solstice. Warm early, cloudy afternoon. Looks like a good chance of showers tonight.
Spread our replacement heifers and bulls into two fields today, hoping that the grass will carry them now without hay. Trying to get all the loose ends of our cattle work done so that we might get to thinking about Christmas, families, etc.
A part of what makes this site exciting and risky is posting fresh poems that I intend to edit or delete completely as we go forward. Some may make the sort to Chapbook In-Progress, an onsite shuffle that may or may not ever be conclusive. But all this is incidental to what I perceive [at the moment] as the purpose of our participation here.
Just now, one local weatherman is relieved that a high-pressure ridge is diverting the “nasty” weather to the north “where it should be,” apparently unaware that current water resources cannot sustain current population growth in the Central Valley. Bill O’Reilly has continually discounted the value of rural culture in his “No Spin Zone” and quite recently queried why anyone would want to know “how a cowboy thinks” in passing reference to the new movie, “Brokeback Mountain.”
The disconnect in the established media selling ad-space plays to the majority, of course. However, even the eldest of C.J. Hadley’s “Red Meat Survivors” are accustomed to being a minority, and those of us younger have become muscled-up swimming against the main stream current. Filling that chasm is tough, perhaps hopeless in the end – but what the hell, we’re still here!
Warming to 70 degrees. We can hear the grass grow.
Warm morning, more rain last night. The grass has jumped today! Lots of grins.
Dry Creek: .76 total
Greasy Creek: .89 total
Front Gate
December 16, 2005
Six Jakes - Gathering Field, Greasy Creek
November 29, 2005
The great leveler
in a frying pan
upon a camp stove
or off the mountains
into an inland sea
to float food and freight
from Stockton to Visalia �
word traveled faster
than the water subsided
in the summer of �68,
how chickens starved
in the branches of trees.
After 41 consecutive days
of rain, the DG
on Dennison Ridge
gave under the weight
of snow and dammed
the South Fork
into a three day lake,
taking part of the Garfield
Grove�s Giant Sequoias
to the Wilderness of Woodville,
scattering redwood and yellow pine
for forty-two miles
where adobe houses melted
and tens of thousands cattle
drowned on Christmas Eve.
Like any other perfect
suburbia with cul-de-sacs
between shopping malls,
concrete walls correlling tracts
of two-storey houses,
business is booming
upon the alluvium
where chickens starved
in the branches of trees.
Ragle Springs
November 29, 2005
Ragle Springs, Sulphur
November 29, 2005
Little good, it seems, becomes a storm
unless it is a twister or hurricane
to chase. Yet, this dribbling,
nuisance rain has loosened
the parched tongues of hillside gray
to symphonies:
chorus upon chorus
of �Glory Hallelujahs�
in the dark �
no better song
for a Sabbath dawn.
Monday through Thursday, the portly
and well-endowed eclipsed the state
to camouflage uncertainty.
Friday, California slid off the screen,
clear into next week. All good signs:
decent and dependable harbingers
for a good chance of rain.
Three-tenths at first light
is enough for the grass
to stay even with the frost,
to make steep roads too slick to feed,
to keep hay in the barn
and hold town in a fog
for a day or two of peace.
Rain: .42 of an inch by dark, low clouds still stacked-up and looking like more on the way.
It’s been foggy in the Valley for about a week, clear here nights and part-days until the fog rises mid-day. The grass, after an inch-plus rain before the first, is pretty slow growing in our cool, sub-60 degree highs, but it’s coming and we’ve started to cut down feeding hay.
After being-out with the cows for two weeks, the bulls have begun playing musical fields, leaving a wake of tangled barbed wire and down fences behind them, testosterone thick in the air. One of the new bulls we bought to turn out with our replacement heifers is already crippled, a fairly expensive GMA bull from George Avila in Merced. George’s bulls have held-up well in the past for us, and I tried them initially because he guarantees, believe it or not, to replace any that get hurt or can’t breed. He’s hauling me a replacement Sunday – now who else do you know would do that?
Is it ego-centric
to pray for sanity�s refrain,
thunder and lightening,
floods and rain enough
for simple words
to float from our tongues
again,
or am I lost
in the multi-syllabic drone
of pundits and politicians
with soft hands
and gossamer masks
no one hears in the din
of belching Detroit steel
out on the street?
There are so many now
going somewhere, spending
whatever ground
concrete cannot contain,
so many ways � yet
no way out of town.
Perhaps it is just
the early stages of senility
clinging to old things
like sycamores or the creek
etched beside a pictograph
of a coyote watching
from as close as he dare.
Brindle Cow & Calf
December 17, 2005
John and Robbin Dofflemyer -- Photo by Clarence Holdbrooks
November 28, 2005 -- Putting the Bulls Out: Top Paregien
Robbin and I have no idea where our participation in this project is going, but we will attempt to share various perspectives from this watershed, hoping to further an understanding of what cattle people do. Ranch-based, we perceive our future as tied to the health and productivity of the land, to the generosity of the weather, yet inevitably at the mercy of politics and politicians. Even so, knowing that our cattle have harvested the renewable resources of grass and water on Dry Creek for three generations evokes both a sense of pride and security for us, and it is our hope to offer fresh eyes in which to look at ranch landscapes, as well as the people and livestock that depend on them.
Should local terminology or our quick journal entries need clarification, we will address these questions as soon as possible. Your comments are welcome.
Located in the foothills of the southern Sierra Nevadas, Dry Creek is a tributary of the Kaweah River and home of one of seventeen stands of Sycamore Alluvial Woodland remaining worldwide, some trees: three to four centuries old. With numerous other rare plant species, the Kaweah River watershed is biologically diverse, emptying with the Kings, Kern and Tule Rivers into Tulare Lake, once the largest freshwater lake in the lower 48 states.
Great Western Divide
November 17, 2005
Prior to the arrival of the Spanish around 1770, native cultures sustained regional population densities between the Kings and Kern Rivers unmatched anywhere else in North America. After the War with Mexico in 1849, Anglo occupation was accelerated by the discovery of gold, and later, large herds of cattle were grazed in the San Joaquin Valley to supply food for California�s growing population. With the advent of farming and a series of severe droughts and floods in the 1860�s, cattle, like the Yokuts, were displaced into the foothills.
Today, the last twelve miles of this watershed contains eight homes and as many grazing operations. With the common and successful opposition to a rock and gravel operation within the Dry Creek channel, we have become a tight community of individuals working towards the overall well-being of the watershed.
Our cow/calf operation has evolved dramatically over the years with improved genetics and the development of year-round stockwater on most of the ranch. As our weaning weights have increased over 50% since 1970, we no longer hold our calves over for a second season of grass as they would be too big and too uneconomic to finish in a feedlot. Subsequently, we have become even more focused on our cows and bulls, striving to offer seven-weight, natural beef candidates for the Video and Internet auctions.
Pair In Sulphur
November 11, 2005
Robbin and I are immersed in the ranch � not only do we work together daily, but we�re constantly devising ways to make our operation more efficient and economically feasible. Beyond our own well-being, we believe that common sense and understanding are tied directly to ranch landscapes and viable rural communities, to the �hands-on� working man and the cattle ranching culture, and that these attributes will eventually become survival skills of more and more value to society in the face of increasing technological conveniences. In addition to the maintenance and preservation of this small watershed�s resources by successfully raising cattle over the long term, we believe that this ranch, and others, can offer �grounded� educations into the future.
Fed in Sulphur
November 17, 2005
We finally cleared and buried
the huge Oleander
with the dozer
high in the horse lot
up Greasy Creek,
leaving nothing of the homestead
where there�s always a breeze
at Sulphur Spring
but cast iron scraps
of an old wood stove �
ever since Earl burned
his Mom and Dad�s cabin
to the ground
when he once stored
a sack of squirrel poison
that his good stud found.
I imagine the extra bucket
his mother packed
to the seedling
each time I pass
this empty space �
her little bit of color
amid toxic leaves
that we erased.
for Joe Bruce
Fog in Sulphur
November 29, 2005
After his invitation to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada in 1989, John Dofflemyer began publishing Dry Crik Review as an effort to inspire the contemporary voice of the cowboy and ranch culture. Under the imprint of Dry Crik Press, Blood Trails, the Viet Nam War poems of Bill Jones and Rod McQueary, was published in 1993. From 1994 to 1996, the press produced chapbooks from Paul Zarzyski, Laurie Wagner Buyer, Sue Wallis , Scott Preston and others. Dofflemyer also edited Maverick Western Verse for Gibbs Smith in 1994. Among other anthologies, his poetry is included in Anne Heath Widmark�s Between Earth and Sky and Cowboy Poetry Matters from Storyline Press. Still in the Mountains, John�s eighth chapbook, was published in 2004.
Seems I�ve been in love
with something forever,
an empty space I tried
to fill with myself.
It is the way it is
for some of us groping
in the dark, holding-tight
to what feels good.
There are still a few
faces and names
that visit from the blue,
but most are blurred
with what I forgot to say �
with what I thought
was free at the time
I was growing up.
The eyes of animals
like the raccoon slinking
from the cat�s dish speak
plain enough. Some blank
turn outside-in like
drooling house dogs
or blind with rage,
a confused cow
that cannot see the gate.
Some trust deeply, but
some so fearful
you dare not meet them
with kind designs. Some
shake hands and look away
to hide what�s on their minds.
One can only watch the news
flash so long, let a world
of guilt and blame into the house.
There�s always something awful
going-on, something new
to pay for tomorrow �
but if we keep our shoulders
to the wheel, if we believe
our consumption will save us,
maybe someday, we will be
relieved of all the agony
we could never afford.
Live Weathervane
December 12, 2005
Heron Landing [seeking safety from a squadron of nesting redwing blackbirds ]
April 23, 2005
Never sure who is entertainment for who, we have a good supply of gophers here, frogs and minnows too.
M R Pigs! Cleaning-up the oat hay.
July 28, 2005
"Wild Sow" in the weaning pen.
September 8, 2005
Around the spring of 1988, Western Horseman featured a piece on the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, and though I was intrigued enough to read it, I dismissed it as a Big Hat show. Shortly thereafter, a friend gave me a copy of Hal Cannon�s first anthology, Cowboy Poetry: A Gathering, a pocket-sized collection of classic cowboy verse. Though some snippets were vaguely familiar, it was my first exposure to the poems and predominantly traditional poets in print.
Shortly thereafter, a lifelong friend suggested that we might head to Elko in January 1989 to hear �a different kind� of music, that the likes of Ian Tyson, whom I had heard and seen with Sylvia at the Troubadour a couple of times in the late 1960�s, were performing some original songs.
I�d been writing poetry of sorts since high school, heavily influenced by Gary Snyder and Robert Creeley, but with an appreciation of both British and American poets of the 19th and early 20th centuries. One hot summer evening while reading Hal�s anthology, it occurred to me that it might be fun to write a couple of poems in this style, shorten-up the lines and double-up the rhymes and then submit them to the Western Folklife Center as long as I planned to be there in January.
My invitation to the Gathering arrived in December and I was panicked, not having a clue of what was expected of me, aware of my fear and string of failures since childhood in front of audiences. Additionally, as near as I could determine after a couple of phone calls to Elko, I needed ten or so more poems to recite. I wanted to hide.
The long drive was torture and I didn�t sleep much in the concrete block, Rodeway Inn the night before the Gathering. I was due to recite with the �California Poets� in the auditorium shortly after what was an inspiring keynote address by Kim Stafford. I hung on every word, desperate still for some clue of what might be expected of me. In the front row after the keynote, I watched Wally McRae closely as he read excerpts from his new collection, Things of Intrinsic Worth, and was relieved to notice that his hand shook more often than not as he held the book above the podium.
Up next, I made my way backstage looking for Jessie Smith who was the host for the session. There I met Leonard Vasquez and Jim Ross, quizzing both intently as to what was expected. I introduced myself to Jessie when he arrived minutes before the session started, and getting little information, I was directed to sit in a chair on stage. Trying to be calm, I stared into blinding lights at a rumbling audience I could not see as Ed Brown, arriving late, sat down beside me. He and Jessie had stayed-up at the Stockman�s and managed less sleep than I.
Ed was up first after Jessie�s introduction. Firmly gripping the rocking podium, he read his poems in record time and retreated immediately backstage. �Go slow� was my mantra throughout, but the applause afterwards from the friendliest audience in the world lifted me above all fear. My first public speaking experience without the lip-twitching stammers and novel length pauses, I floated throughout the remainder of the Gathering, apparently having dubbed my experience to a local reporter as akin to a Cowboy Disneyland.
Brindle Cow @ Rabbit Flat
November 4, 2005
The horned-brindle cow won�t stop
at alfalfa flaked to forty-four others
along the dirt track through
a mountain woodland, moves-on
to a spot beneath an old Blue Oak.
Up and down, she sniffs the ground
as we stop to watch her roll and contract,
twist her heavy head above her back.
You slip away to photograph,
as I write these first few lines
and miss the birthing, the quick
slide of the sack, and by reading
her ears I know you are behind her
taking pictures -
never had one
of your own.
She eats and licks placenta
from its face somewhere below
the dry and brittle thistles,
the frayed and flared umbilical
swings fire-red in the sunlight
beneath her tail. Her bag freshens
as she chews, colostrum
rushing to charge each teat.
I breathe deeply, fully as you suggest
as I wait, October dust and forty years
of cigarettes choke my wind away
and she, hardly a heiferette,
ages with us in this belonging -
each tied as one
along her underside to suck �
a black bull calf.
Volume V, Nos. I & II
Winter-Spring 2006
Dedicated to the well-crafted and artful insights of a disappearing breed of men and women.
Editor: John C. Dofflemyer
Reviews: Scott Preston
Photos: Robbin Dofflemyer
ISSN: 1062-3612
Copyright 2006 Dry Crik Press
Contents used by permission of the authors and artists. All rights revert back to the authors and artists upon publication. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except for brief quotations used in connection with reviews written specifically for inclusion in magazine or newspaper articles.
PUBLISHED BY:DRY CRIK PRESS
P.O. BOX 44320
LEMON COVE, CA 93244
In memory of J. B. Allen
KINGS AND SLAVES
FIERCE AS GRIZZLIES IN THE SPRINGTIME
PROUD AS SAGE HENS CAUGHT IN RUT
TOUGH AS RAWHIDE CURED IN SEASON
HARD AS GRANITE SHAVINS – BUT
INSIDE
THERE LIVED AN ARTIST’S EYE
A POET’S WAY WITH WORDS
RESPECT FOR PROPER WOMEN FOLK
AND SLAVE TO GRAZIN HERDS
FER
THERE WEREN’T A WORLD OF CHOICES
TO A BAREFOOT FARMER’S KID
OR A RAGGED TOWN-BRED URCHIN
SWEEPIN FLOORS AND STAYIN HID.
VIEW THEIR WORLD FROM THAT PERSPECTIVE –
NONE TO LEND A HELPIN HAND
BUT A LEAN OLD HARDENED WAGON BOSS
THE LORD OF VIRGIN LAND
MOLDIN
MEN WITH HARSH DEMEANOR
SPIRITS HELD BY PINIONED WINGS
‘TIL THEY SHARED SOME MAGIC MOMENT
KEPT FOR ANGELS, PARDS, AND KINGS.
Dry Crik Review, Summer 1992
As a tangent to our participation in the Western Folklife Center’s Deep West Blog, I have taken the chance and opportunity to finally present this “lost” issue of Dry Crik Review. The risk inherent with changing formats from a magazine to Internet layout lies primarily with the presentation of the work, which was submitted for a lit-mag format over a decade ago. Assuming that we will overcome the technical obstacles and limitations while trying to incorporate the advantages of a web-based publication, this may be a “transitional” issue or the “last” issue. At this juncture, only time will tell.
Giving up the feeling of a book to hold in my hand, a weightier and more tangible sense of accomplishment, leaves not only an empty space on the bookshelf, but in my psyche as well. Typically, I open chapbooks and small press poetry publications in the middle pages, hoping that the style and content of a random selection intrigues me to move forward or back, and eventually to the Introduction and Acknowledgements, and lastly to the masthead. If my page bites are large and it goes back on the shelf, more often than not I’ll reopen it later to repeat the process again.
In perspective, each issue of DCR has been unique. There weren’t but a dozen books on the table in the Elko Convention Center in 1989, 25% of which were authored by Wallace McRae, most of the rest by folklorists. The utility of a printed format for contemporary cowboy poetry seemed obvious.
On the fourteen hour drive home from Wickenburg, Arizona, I remember struggling with the inclusion of two Viet-Nam poems that I had heard for the first time in Vess Quinlan’s motel room after the gathering. Soliciting poetry that worked on the page for the first saddle-stapled issue was tough enough in a genre just beginning to accept something other than traditional poems, but to include “Body Burning Detail” by Bill Jones and “For Bo” by Rod McQueary could sink the ship before it got afloat. I decided to take the chance somewhere around Barstow, a decision that involved my own views on the senselessness of the Viet Nam War that later evolved to Blood Trails, published by Dry Crik Press in 1993, a collaborative odyssey from both men that needed perspective, if not resolution, twenty years after each man’s honorable discharge from the Marines.
Though I may have wrestled longer with the impact of Rod and Bill’s poems on a yet to be established subscriber base in 1990, my reservations now center on my ability to accurately, or acceptably, reproduce each contributor’s work to the Internet page as submitted. I trust that most contributors will weigh my dilemma with getting their work out to a wider and perhaps more diverse audience, or so I hope, but I deal with this ambiguity as I write, not knowing how the final product will look or feel on a computer screen. We can, however, edit onsite or delete a poem completely should a contributor not be satisfied with the presentation of his work.
DCR’s subscribers have generally been rooted in cowboy poetry. The aim of this publication has always been to share, and thereby inspire, contemporary voices from this land-based culture on the page – whether cowboy or rancher, farmhand or farmer – voices appealing to, and perhaps even enhancing, senses once common to all.
Difficult to measure, but after reading Scott Preston’s 10 year-old reviews included in this issue, I can’t help but wonder if the cowboy genre has made much creative progress in the interim. During the same period, however, there seems to have been a proliferation of cowboy entertainers and venues, judging by news accounts, focusing more on awards and ceremony than content. My judgment in this regard is generally prejudiced against the quick-draw, slap-stick stuff as misrepresentative of a contemporary culture raising a healthier and better product while grazing and maintaining ranch landscapes with the longer view in mind.
As a more realistic counterbalance, however, C. J. Hadley’s Range Magazine has done an admirable job presenting this culture and the divisive issues before it. Her stories, her people and her color photographs are alive, and therein is the difference for which we owe her our gratitude. Too often, I suspect, pieces written for the stage appeal to the audiences’ misconceptions of this culture, or the Hollywood myth, which all but assumes that our culture is dead.
In the text of Stewart Udall’s talk at Elko included in this issue, he says, “The healthy part of the national tissue is small-town America. Small communities. The rural areas of this country.” And despite the TV news and pressures for more development, those of us "out-here" sense this is true. Whether James Magorian’s imagery or William Studebaker’s irony, we can make these fertile connections with everyday, rural life – and they enhance our view of the world and ourselves. Ken Brewer captures the small community; Linda Caldwell her Paint Lick, Kentucky home, making life richer as we go.
Though this issue lacks the heft of a book, it may be more cohesive than any that have preceded it. It is appropriately dedicated in memory of J.B. Allen, an ever-dependable friend and candid critic whose poetry has appeared in nearly every issue of this publication.
Whether we inspire debate or more powerful connections with our expression, we are all beneficiaries of each contribution herein. My special thanks to each contributor whose patience may have waned over time, but only because they actually forgot all about this Lost Issue of Dry Crik Review – I hope you’re pleased.
- JCD
Paul Zarzyski
“The Horseman, The Poet, The Code, The Horse”
“Putting the Rodeo Try Into Cowboy Poetry”
Kenneth W. Brewer
“The Night They Saved Uncle Lyman From the Hands of God”
“The Widower’s Lament”
Neil Meili
“Winter in the Barn”
“Herefords”
Linda Caldwell
“Look Softly It Is My Home”
Joel Randall
“No, We Weren’t Poor”
“Old Cowboy”
“Expert Counter”
Vici Skladanowski
“A Man of Few Words”
Tom Brown
“Sweet Becky”
Marcia Darnell
“Grounding”
William Studebaker
“Raking Walnuts”
“Windsickness: Why My Father Never Married”
“Spawned-Out”
“Back to Bone”
Annette LeBox
“In Praise of Blue-eyed Cowboys”
Michael J. Vaughn
“And Roy Rogers Sang the Torah”
Stewart Udall
“A Call for Westerners to Savor the Rich Land Legacy That Is Their Birthright”
Gary Snyder
"Oil"
“Reeds”
James Magorian
“Husking”
Gary Short
“Conference”Wayne Hogan
“Shoshonean”
“A Cowboy’s Larger Meaning of Downtown L.A.”
Scott Preston Reviews
CHARLIE GOODNIGHT
COWBOYS & IMAGES
TULARE DUST
BEWTEEN EARTH & SKY
HONKY-TONK CANTOS AND DRUNKARD’S DREAMS
The Quiet Man
“The Quintessence of Quietude”
THE HORSEMAN, THE POET, THE CODE, THE HORSESizing up each other’s hearts, and caught
off guard by ripples of their own
reflections, the poet reveres the horseman
as high priest, the horseman beholds
the poet as wizard. In the round pen
with a gentle colt, the trinity of hearts
beats most lovingly because, with love,
nobody becomes the broken. They delight in the flying
lead change of fresh blood, fresh words,
circulating within horse, within horseman and poet,
within this circular cowboy universe
where no two boot heels or hooves – like stars,
like snowflakes or meteorites
or the blacksmith’s hammer striking hot iron –
have ever fallen with the same grace,
gravity, fervor, and force
exactly to the same circle. The two men agree that,
for strangers, they agree much
too eagerly. And then, wide-eyed, again
in harmony, they nod to the synchronized wisdom
of their mentors – Hugo, Dorrance – showing them how
it’s you feeling the horse, the poem,
and the poem, the horse, feeling you.
The horseman hands the poet an old bridle – worn
Jeremiah Watt bit and braided reins
he cowboyed with in five states. The poet
hands the horseman a thin book of works
he wrote between rodeos he rode in one-dream
three-bar towns. Seldom has either man known
an adios so slow. In unison they turn
toward the round corral, sudden wind
imitating the sound of wings. Angels – some say
ranahan angels, disguised as fresh western air,
will perch the circle of top rails. Hands still
clasped in their long good-bye,
horseman and poet come full-circle
to this message, to A Blessing, to friendship
lit at the withers between earth and sky.for Randy Rieman
from: All This Way For The Short Ride: Roughstock Sonnets
PUTTING THE RODEO TRY INTO COWBOY POETRYLet’s begin with the wildest landscape, space
inhabited by far more of them
than our own kind and, yes, we are talking
other hearts, other stars. Fall in love with all
that is new born – universe, seedling, dawn,
human, foal, calf. Love equally
the seasons, know each sky has meaning,
winter-out the big lonesomes, the endless
horizons our hopes sink beyond
once every minute, sometimes
seeming to never rise
again for air or light,
for life. Fall madly in love
with earth’s fickle ways. Heed
hard the cosmos cues, the most
miniscule pulsings, subtle nods – no heavy-
handed tap or poke, nothing muscular,
no near-death truths revealed, no telephone
or siren screaming us out of sleep
at 3 a.m. Forget revelation.
Forgive religion. Let’s believe instead in song
birds or Pegasus, the only angels
we’ll ever need. Erase for good
inspiration from our Random Bunk-
House Dictionaries, from our petty heads
and pretty ambitions. Poetry is not
the grace or blessing we pray for – Poetry
is the Goddess for whom
we croon. Sing and surely we shall see
how she loves our music in any key –
any color, any creed, any race, any breed. Rhyme
if the muse or mood moves us
to do so. Go slow. Walk
then trot, lope then rock
and roll for even a split second, our souls
in the thundergust middle, the whole
world suddenly getting western,
pitching a tizzy fit, our horses
come uncorked – just as we were
seriously beginning to think
we savvied the salty? To believe we could
ever turn the stampede,
like steers, into a milling
circle? Into a civil gathering of words?In Memory of Buck Ramsey
from: Wolf Tracks on the Welcome Mat
THE NIGHT THEY SAVED UNCLE LYMAN
FROM THE HANDS OF GOD
Berry days.
the whole region
came to town
for the parade –
25 entries,
counting the Lamprey kids
and their red wagon
pulled by two dogs.
The whole day
was noise and colors,
kids chasing kids
and papas chasing mamas.
It was Berry Days,
and juicy, sticky
summer days.
Hot enough
to offer the Bishop
a beer in public.
The boys ate dust
on the diamonds,
fanned away the bugs
in the field
with their mitts,
sweat in their crotches
harsh as corncobs.
That evening
everybody –
everybody
danced.
Four bands took turns
all into the late
cool hours past righteousness.
Lemonade inside –
beer and whiskey out.
Toward midnight
they missed Uncle Lyman.
The men went looking
while the women
gathered the kids for home.
They found him
behind the church,
cross-legged on the lawn
by the picnic table.
Old Mary
the born-again Christian
was unbuttoning
the second button
of Lyman’s blue shirt,
his overalls’ suspenders
were off his shoulders
and spread on the
ground like
angel’s wings.
The men hesitated,
then one of them
called out Lyman’s
name as if
calling a lost pig.
Mary jumped up,
ran around the
church and
out of sight.
Lyman didn’t move.
When the men
got to him,
he was snoring.
They pulled up his straps,
backed the pick-up
and loaded him in.
Nobody told the women.
Not long after,
Born-again Mary
got sent to
the State Hospital
at Blackfoot.
“thought she was God,”
someone reported.
The men smiled
but wondered
just what Lyman
might have missed.
THE WIDOWER’S LAMENT“Jakob,”
she would say.
Her lips
would come together
like a kiss.He misses
her most
in winter,
morning and
night,her warm skin,
her breath,
the honeyed smell
of her wet hair,
the sound of “Jakob.”Even the flaps
of skin
where breasts
and nipples
had beenhe remembers
even the scars
heated his hands
beneath the blankets
in the dark, cold nights.Now he curls
around an empty space,
warms his hands
between his thighs,
and wakes to sorrow –his name unspoken.
He touches the cows
like an embarrassed lover
Sips coffee
with his eyes closed.
WINTER IN THE BARN
Steam rises from the backs of big horses.
The old Holstein in the second stall
shifts her weights from side to side
matching the rhythm of milking
and flicks her tail at memories
of summer flies
Across the width of barn
I stand with mouth open
in my biggest five year old oval
catching most of the warm milk
squirted dead eye straight
by the laughing hired man
In the tack room
kittens wait by a tin plate
to put their moustache on
In my memory it is always warm in the barn.
HEREFORDSThey’re not as storied as the Texas Longhorn
nor as hairy as those Highland creedsThey’re not nearly as sophisticated
As those new European breedsThey don’t calve out as easy as Angus
But they’ll answer all your needs(and they’re pretty too)
I remember
few things as beautiful
as looking back from the point
and seeing a few hundred Herefords
pouring through a cleft in the hills
down to the home corrals
like a spring flood
red as the earth and blood
rolling with white faced foam.
LOOK SOFTLY IT IS MY HOME
I drive down this road nestled in the hollow
slowly today
the road that I travel to home
usually I give the landscape only an accepting glance
because its mine
indelible
with eyes closed
far away I see it still
because it is my home
slowly I look through your eyes
but it is still beautiful
because it is spring
the rain has fallen here
softly drying on the pavement
where we were only an hour ago
it was dry
I tell you
“look softly because it is my home”
when I arose this morning
with my feverish dreams still clinging
(you were there of course)
the mist had collected on the curve of the hill
like a skim of milk
milked diagonally into a bowl
the cows still lay in the watery sweet grass
in dim silhouettes
your eyes were in my head
lately I look at everything with them
valuing judging
and then discarding
because it is too beautiful for their pity
NO, WE WEREN’T POOR
Nice house
painted white
window too.
No roll
catalog.
Went to town
every other
Saturday nite.
Visited on the corner
traded eggs
for groceries.
Sold cream
for cash
No we weren’t poor.
In the summertime
last stop
ice
big block.
In the fall
new shoes
for school.
Bought some
coal too.
No we weren’t poor,
OLD COWBOYAnguish
the man
his face
the pain
his silence.
His past
the scars.
A map
of mistakes.
Life lived
traveling
too fast.
Dust settling
in the wrinkles.
The count
never questioned
Expert counter
Bowlegged and crippled
Stiff and slow
old cowboy
Standing on the rail
at the gate
Eyes alert and quick
Dust cloud
Stampeding by
Bawling, bellerin & crowdin
Mixed herd
cows, calves and bulls
all sizes and colors
The count
Never questioned
Expert counter
Buyer and seller
Money exchanged
movin on
Greenhorn observer
Stampeding herd
NY city baffled
Asked the old cowboy
How could anyone
possibly count em
He replied – Easy –
Just count the feet
Divide by 4
The count
never questioned
Expert Counter.
A MAN OF FEW WORDS
(in the voice of Rhae Foster)
My mule just died – the one I called Mac
One hell of a beast – surefooted, strong back
Been with me for years, I can still hear his bray
Nothin’ lasts forever, so what can I say?
My wife stayed with me almost twenty years
She warned that she’d leave me – I just didn’t hear
Said she needed affection, conversation, bouquets
But I am how I am, so what can I say?
That strong hail last month took the tops off the wheat
Now folks there in Russia won’t have bread to eat
It looked real good, too – ‘til that chilled, cloudy day
Can’t predict the weather, so what can I say?
The daughter left home last year in the fall
Walked out in the night – doesn’t write, doesn’t call
I’ve read of young hookers on the streets of L.A.
I hope she’s not with them, but what can I say?
New calves on the north range got caught in that storm
It snowed late last spring and they couldn’t stay warm
My banker won’t like me when it’s time to pay
But what could I do? And what can I say?
Uncle Sam now possesses my only son
He hated this ranch – said life here’s no fun
Said I was a tyrant – all work and no play
He’s left me short handed, but what can I say?
Grazingland west of the road’s up in smoke
A bolt from the north flashed and struck that dry oak
Ground’s charred and black like the earth on doomsday
Was a sure act of God, so what can I say?
The tractor broke down and the baler won’t work
It was goin’ just fine but then stopped with a jerk
Perturbs me, I’m three weeks behind with the hay
I know rain’s a-comin’, but what can I say?
At times I’m not sure what life’s all about
Hard work is my virtue, of that there’s no doubt
I’d be praised by my Pappy, could he see me today
Kept my nose to the grindstone, what more can I say?
But now I’ve that lived long enough to look back
I wonder if Pappy was a little off track
Is a man only worth what he’s done in a day?
Well, that’s what he taught me – what can I say?
My wife was a helpmate, and pretty as well
I miss her good cookin’, her laughter, her smell
If I had one more chance I might ask her to stay
But those days are gone, so what can I say?
Sixteen’s awful young to be out on the street
I hope that girl’s safe and has somethin’ to eat
I remember her singin’ and dancin’ and gay
I miss her some now, but what can I say?
I wanted my son to become a good man
A hardworkin’ partner – that was my plan
Should I have hugged him or done some horseplay?
Oh well, he’s gone now, so what can I say?
Grim Reaper’s here early, he shows no respect
A tumor has got me, it’s here in my neck
Thought I’d live longer but I’ll soon be clay
Doc says there’s no hope, so what can I say?
My life’s almost over, I’m stuck in this bed
Been thinkin’ ‘bout things that I might have said
As I lie here a-dyin’, time fadin’ away
Not a word comes to mind. I have nothin’ to say.
Sweet Becky
Early during the last summer of the war, Mister Shivers decided to put in a crop of sweet potatoes and needed a lot of cheap stoop labor since the only thing that ain’t done strictly by hand is the plowing and row making, which he did himself with lots of help from Sweet Becky. Being as how my mamma was a good friend of Miz Shivers, she got me and my good buddy Ronny on as field hands. We weren’t but thirteen, but the work wasn’t supposed to be too hard and we were out of something to do and a dollar a day and dinner wasn’t bad wages for kids in 1945, even with a war going on.
Miz Shivers was a short, round, brown-headed woman with a little limp in her left leg and a sweet face that made people smile. Mister Shivers didn’t have much hair and was little and skinny and the kids called him “Popeye” behind his back. I guess he was nice enough since Miz Shivers seemed to like him, but he didn’t have much to say to a thirteen year-old boy – and when he said it, he sounded grumpy.
Mamma got me out of bed at five and put a field hand’s breakfast down me before I had my eyes open good: Orange juice, oatmeal with cream and brown sugar, three fried eggs, three pieces of fried sow belly, buttered biscuits and a big Bama jelly glass full of sweet milk.
Just as I was washing down the last biscuit with the last gulp of milk, Mamma looked out the window and said, “I hear Blackie growling. It must be Ronny coming – time to go. Work hard and mind what Mr. Shivers tells you and be careful and don’t get hurt – and here, don’t forget your straw hat.”
It was still dark but just before gettin’ on early daylight when we left my house. We were supposed to be at the place by sunup and it was a two mile walk, Since we were cutting the time a little close, we started out doing the Scout pace, running a hundred steps and walking ten. It got light enough to see when we got about half-way there and things were so pretty we forgot about the running part.
The ditches and little bayous were bank full of ground fog that looked like whipped cream with lazy smoke wisping off the top and slowly spilling over into the woods and fields and crossing the road in a few low places. A couple of mockingbirds were arguing about who lived where and the crickets were waking up replacing the sound of frogs. There wasn’t a people sound in the whole world except for our shoes crunching the oyster shell road. A rooster crowed. A dog barked a long way off. We didn’t talk. We walked soft and slow and listened and breathed it all in as we moseyed along like we had all day.
The bottom-half of the sun was still down and its top wasn’t quite up to the lowest strand of bobwire on Popeye’s back fence when we got there. He wanted to know if we knew the difference between mid-morning and sunrise. I just ducked my head and kept my mouth shut. Ronny thought it was a real question that he was supposed to answer so he allowed as how he did know the difference and right now was just about sunrise since the sun wasn’t full up and it was a long ways off from mid-morning.
“That little bit of popping off and being late will cost you two a dime.”
“A dime apiece or from both of us a nickel apiece?”
“Just a dime from you, Mister Speaker of the House.”
“That don’t seem hardly fair. There ain’t no work started yet. We ain’t missed nothing and we both got here at the same time.”
“That’s still ninety cents and dinner for a day’s work from a little shirttail boy which is more than I’m paying them Meskins. They make six bits and are damn glad to get it. Do you want to work or talk all morning?”
With that he turned and motioned for us to follow him. Miz Shivers and the three Perez kids were sitting under the big lone hackberry tree that shaded half of the backyard cutting slips from sweet potato vines and putting them in tubs of well water.
“Winnie, when you and them Meskins get four tubs cut, take them Meskins and Mr. Speaker of the House with you and set ‘em to cutting some more vines out of Noto’s field. We’re going to need at least five more tubs of slips by the end of the day. Shavetail and I’ll hook up Sweet Becky and lay out what you got cut there and we can start planting right after dinner.”
He turned to me and said, “Hey, boy, you ever drive a mule?”
“No sir.”
“Come on, I’m gonna teach you right now. Can’t nobody but me get a bit and harness on Sweet Becky or I’d teach you that too, but once that’s done, she’ll let anybody drive her until it’s time to come to the house and then she don’t need driving; she just comes whether you’re ready or not.”
“Yes sir.”
Ronny had taught me how to get along with Popeye. My guess was that “Yes sir” and “No sir” was about all the talking I was going to need all day long.
Sweet Becky was a little, light red, mare mule no more than nine hands high. Even though she took more after her little jackass daddy than her horse mamma, being more the size of a big donkey than a mule, she sure had a mulish look about her and, as it turned out, mulish ways. She had a black mane whose color continued on as a thin stripe down her light red back and spread out on her rump like a fan before running on down into her coal black tail. Her muzzle was a light gray color that mixed through the red on her cheeks as it ran up her jaws to the bottom of her black ears. Her eyelashes were snow white like a sweet little old lady’s.
When we walked up she was in the handling lot next to the barn standing on three legs with her head down and her eyes closed looking like a nice little old lady taking her ease in the morning shade. The only thing to cast some doubt on this serene image was the notion that her left rear leg wasn’t just up and resting off the ground; it was cocked and ready to kick the mortal hell out of anybody fool enough to walk behind her.
“Now don’t you just look sweet and gentle enough to work at the pony ride, you four-flushing, vicious, bitch of a mule straight out of hell. You sure ain’t fooling me with your play acting. I know you like a book, I do.”
Sweet Becky half-opened one eye, laid one ear back alongside her head and swished her tail.
“Shavetail, you stay right here outside the fence and just watch until I tell you different. Whatever you do, don’t get anywheres near that mule unless she’s hitched, you hear me?”
“Yes sir.”
Popeye went in the front door of the barn and came out through the stalls and into the lot carrying a lone, solid oak, three foot singletree. No bridle, bit, reins, collar, trace chains or harness, just a singletree. Becky slowly half-opened the other eye and laid back the other ear but didn’t move nothing else. Popeye tried to circle her at about three steps out to get around in front of her, since she had her rump pointed right at him when he walked out of the stalls. As he got close, she slowly came alive. As Popeye circled she turned, keeping her rump pointed right at him as he moved around her. He tried a little jig step or two to fake her out, but she was just as fast as he was and beat him every time.
Finally he ran right at her heels waving that singletree over his head and hollered, “Heah – Mule – Haa!”
In one instant uncoiling motion she delivered a double-hoofed high kick that would have sent the San Jacinto Monument halfway to Dallas had it connected. She missed by less than a foot and he was right under her left shoulder before she could recover – too far up to kick and too close to bite. They pirouetted around for three full circles in a ballet of jumpin’, cussin’, and bitin’ air when he jumped out in front of her with that singletree held high over his head and brought it down with a mighty crack right between her ears. She let out a swooshing noise through her nose and went down first on one knee and then the other. I thought he had killed her. Her eyes were wide open and crossed with one looking at the other one like they hadn’t been introduced.
As she was staggering back up on her wobbly legs, he was slipping the bit into her mouth and buckling the bridle on her poor old sore head. She shook her head like a wet duck dog shaking pond water and then stood there just as nice and ladylike as you pleased while he finished harnessing her and hitching her to a little wooden sled.
“Open the gate, boy. It’s time you learn how to farm.”
He drove her over to the hackberry tree and I loaded four tubs of slips on the sled.
“Let’s have a cup of coffee and I’ll explain what it is we’re trying to do.”
I couldn’t believe what I saw. He just dropped the reins on the ground and we walked off into the kitchen without him even looking back at Sweet Becky. She dropped her head, lifted her left rear leg and half-closed her eyes, and but for being hitched, looked just like she did when I first saw her: a nice old lady mule at peace with the world.
He got two big thick white mugs without handles like they use aboard ship and poured us up two cups of real black coffee with the grounds floating around in it. I was afraid to ask for milk or sugar and gagged it down like I drank it that way every morning.
“First off, we don’t plant eyes like they do Irish potatoes or seeds like they do corn. We plant slips. A slip is a little piece of the sweet potato vine that has been cut off to about six inches long and has at least one joint where some roots have started to grow out. I bought the vines from Noto as they lay in his field. That’s where Winnie is right now, watching the Meskins and Mr. Speaker cut vines. We soak them overnight causing little roots to grow out from the joints in the vine. That’s what was in those tubs under the tree, soaking vines. What we have in the tubs on the sled is the slips cut from those vines.
“We take the slips and lay them out on the top of the rows about two feet apart and the field hands come walking along and poke them in the dirt with a broom handle with a notch cut in the end taking care that the little roots at the joint is buried. Then they kick dirt over the hole left from the poking and step on the slip to pack down the dirt and walk on to the next one and so on. Then all we have to do is pray for rain the first two weeks and a drought the last two of the growing season and we got us a crop. If it don’t rain the first two weeks, the slips die – and if it does rain the last two, the potatoes rot. Once we get through planting, the rest is up to God except for a little early cultivating to keep the weeds down. Now you understand why most farmers go to church. Let’s go – we’re burning daylight.”
We climbed on the sled. He clicked his teeth and Sweet Becky started a slow deliberate walk in the direction she was pointed and answered the reins like a pet the mile or so to the field. I was standing on the sled waiting for her to back over us and kick our brains out, but she acted like this was all her idea, like she was going to do the farming and brought us along to watch so’s we’d know how the next time.
The sweet potato field was one of eight fields evenly divided off out of a fenced section of pasture land (one mile square or 640 acres) by further dividing it with one fence straight down the middle and three more across it leaving eight separate eighty acre fields to farm or graze. The way it was divided, the fields came out in one-half by one-quarter mile rectangles. Because the slope of the land, Popeye ran the rows lengthwise, making them a half-mile long. Planted two feet apart it takes 1320 slips to make a row. The row tops were four feet apart. That gives you 330 rows. That’s 435,600 slips. That’s a whole bunch of sweet potatoes. I was too little to do this sort of arithmetic in my head, but I knew just from looking at all them long rows that me, Ronny, Popeye, Sweet Becky and three little Meskin kids weren’t going to finish in this century.
Popeye said that Sweet Becky like to work to the left, just like racehorses like to run to the left, so he started her up between the first two rows commencing on the southeast corner of the field. That way Sweet Becky could go to her left on her first turn at the north end of the first rows. He said she didn’t seem to mind having to turn back to her right after she came back to the starting end to go back up the field. I wondered out loud why she thought she had to go left on the first turn since there ain’t no real good way to go up and down rows without turning left on one end and right on the other. What difference could it possibly make to her which way she turned first.
Popeye said, “Mules are a whole lot like wives ‘ceptin’ you ain’t allowed to hit wives in between the eyes with a singletree whether they need it or not. There ain’t no explaining some of their notions, but if you really put your mind to it you can learn to live with them with just a little bending here and there and still get the job done. On the other hand, if you don’t do it their way every now and then, it ain’t nothing but a peck of trouble from morning to night. The only real grief is figuring out what they have on their minds, not how come. Shavetail, there ain’t but two good, foolproof, logical ways to handle a female anything and I don’t know either one of them. That’s just the way they are and that’s good enough for me.”
When he got Sweet Becky started up the first row, he tied off the reins to one of the handles on the front tub to keep them up out of the way and started slinging slips off first one side and then the other so they fell about two feet apart on the rows on either side of the sled. Sweet Becky had her head down, her ears flopped forward and her eyes half-shut and was keeping a slow, steady gait of about 60 human paces per minute which gave the slip slinger just the right amount of time to set the slips without having to hurry and mess up the spacing once he got the rhythm of it.
When we got to the end of that first row Sweet Becky turned left, walked over two rows, turned left again and started back without Popeye ever touching the reins or saying a word. Popeye sat down on a tub, rolled a cigarette out of sack of Bull Durham and told me to have a go at it. I missed a few and had to run back and put them where they should have landed and then catch up with Sweet Becky and the sled. By the time I caught the sled I had overrun five or six slip spots leaving a fourteen foot gap. Things were already getting out of hand and I just got started. The only thing to do was grab a double handful of slips and put them down on the run as I was chasing the sled. I was getting winded and tired while Sweet Becky was just plodding rhythmically along with her eyes closed and a look of complete repose on her muley face.
“Shavetail, it’s hard to tell who’s the mule and who’s the boy by who’s doin’ the most work but it’s sure plain as day who’s the smartest. I don’t see the mule doing no running.”
“Yes – sir.”
“Whoa – you lop-eared sister of Satan. Whoa! Or I’ll jerk your damn teeth right out of your damned hard head if I have to get up and untie them reins to make you whoa you red willful stubborn bitch of a cross between a dumb jackass and whore horse. Whoa! I say.”
Sweet Becky stopped but laid her ears back and rolled her upper lip to let everybody know she didn’t approve of having her rhythm broken or her deep thoughts interrupted by a boy’s clumsiness in slinging slits. She was used to working with pros and had no patience with amateurs.
“Just get back in, catch your breath and don’t get in such a hurry. It’ll come to you by the time you get to the end of the row. Now see if you can get this little red bitch to walking again and working for you instead of you working for her.”
Popeye had a little grin on his face. I suspected that Sweet Becky had her own peculiarities about getting back to work.
“Get up, Mule. Hii, mule –gettieup – go!”
All I got out of Sweet Becky was a hide-ripple down her backbone that started at her withers and rippled back to her flanks.
“Shavetail, it looks like she’s confused about who’s supposed to be in charge here. Women or mules, you can’t ever let that happen, not even once or you’ll windup being the mule forever.”
I walked around to the side of her head and bit the mortal hell out of her left ear. She didn’t even look up. She started her mule shuffling gait down the row like nothing ever happened.
Sure enough, by the time we finished that half-mile row I was pitching them in there like Dizzy Dean. Popeye hopped off the sled at the end of the row.
“I’ll bring out five more tubs of slips. That’ll hold you two until dinner. Don’t worry about what time to come to the house for dinner – Sweet Becky will know when it’s time. Just give her her head and she’ll come on in, but don’t encourage her too much or she’ll get in too big a hurry.”
It looked like Sweet Becky and I had come to an agreement. She did her job of walking up and down the rows and I did mine of placing slips. She even knew to stop for fresh tubs while I dropped off the empties and reloaded the fulls without any orders from me. We turned out to be quite a team once we got the preliminaries worked out. I never had to touch the reins for the rest of the morning except to retie them to a full tub.
She even taught me something Popeye forgot to tell me. When it was about 11:45 according to my nickel-plated, genuine brass, Pocket Ben dollar watch, she didn’t start back up the next row, but turned down the house-end of the field and stopped at the nearest stack of empty tubs at the end of the row where we had left them. It took me a minute to catch on, but she knew that we were supposed to bring them back to the house to be refilled. This was the first time she looked back at me all morning. I put the two empties on the sled and she plodded on to the next stack and then the next, stopping briefly for me to load and stack them inside one another on the sled.
When the last two tubs were loaded, we moseyed back to the house and she stopped under the shade of the hackberry tree. She slowly turned her head toward the back door of the house, perked up her ears and let out a “Heeee-Haaw Heee-Haaaw” that made me jump a foot out of my brogans. Popeye stuck his head out of the kitchen window and hollered, “Dammit to hell, I seen you come in, you noisy old bitty. Hold your harness until I get my shoes on you contrary old bag of bones. I’m comin’ – I’m comin’ – dagnabbit.”
The omission of the Lord’s name and general mildness of his cussin’ meant that Miz Shivers was home and probably in the kitchen with him. Popeye came out and unhitched Sweet Becky, led her to the water trough and then put out a half-bucket of feed and motioned me to the kitchen door.
I had been watching this mule-man tenderness from my place under the hackberry tree where Ronny and the Perez kids were sitting on buckets and tubs eating a dinner of corn bread, pinto beans, mustard greens and sausage off tin plates with a bucket of milk and a tin dipper set out for drinks. It looked mighty good to me and I was anxious to get started, but I sure knew better than to do anything else but follow his stiff-armed, over-handed wave toward the back of the house.
“Hello, Miz Shivers. Can I have a drink of water, please ma’am?”
She turned on Popeye like a quick terrier rat dog and hissed, “Earl, have you had this boy out in the field all morning on a scorching South Texas day like today without a bucket of water?”
“Now Winnie, don’t get excited. You know that if I had a bucket of water in that field he wouldn’t have got but a little snip anyway. That mule would have drunk it all or stepped in it as soon as I left. Besides, it ain’t July or August, like it was hot or anything, and I did it for his own good, that’s what I did.”
She had been filling a glass with chopped ice and water while all this talking was going on. She wiped my face with a wet dishrag and handed me a brimming glass of ice water.
“Honey, you go in the bathroom and wash up and come on and sit down at the dinner table. Earl, you and I’ll talk more about this later.”
We had pot roast, mashed potatoes with cream gravy, early green beans, cucumbers floating in ice water and vinegar; hot biscuits with fresh churned butter and a dewberry cobbler.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t have time to make some ice cream for that cobbler, but I got so busy with the vine cutting and the field hands’ dinner that I just plumb ran out of time.”
“Aw – that’s all right Winnie. You can crank up some for supper if it makes you feel better. This’ll do for dinner, such as it is. By the way, you forgot to sweeten the tea.”
“Earl, you heathen, I wasn’t talking to you. You’re getting more like your mule every day.”
“Miz Shivers, that was a real nice dinner. I sure do thank you.”
She broke into one of her contagious grins and gave me a big sweaty hug and told me to wait until she fixed me a water bottle to take to the field with me. She said that if I kept it covered up with wet slips in one of the bottom tubs it might stay cooler. She handed me a quart Mason jar of ice and water wrapped with a towel and glowered at Popeye as she shooed us out of her kitchen, and hollered at Ronny and the Perez kids to bring in their dishes. I noticed that Gloria Perez was washing them under the pump as we walked out so all Miz Shivers had to do was scald them and set them to dry.
Popeye told me to get Ronny aside and tell him not to tell the Perez kids what he was making. At the end of the day he wasn’t going to give Ronny but three quarters like the Perez kids but was going to give me Ronny’s extra fifteen cents on the side when he slipped me my dollar.
The Meskins will want white wages if they know what I am paying you two. No sense in making them feel bad. What they don’t know can’t hurt them, I always say. Come to think on it, I’ll give you an extra quarter so Mr. Speaker will get his whole dollar. I’m getting five more six-bit Meskins in this afternoon so I won’t need him tomorrow. Winnie’s got too many dollar friends for my six-bit budget as it is.”
“Yes sir.”
That afternoon Ronny, the Perez kids and five older, near-grown Meskins I had never seen before were all out in the field planting the slips I had laid out that morning. At first it looked like they might catch up with me and Sweet Becky, but after the first hour they started straightening up more often and holding their low backs and drinking more water. There wasn’t no doubt about it. Riding that sled and slinging slips was the choice job. My old man was right. It wasn’t as much what you knew as it was who.
Popeye came out in the field and told me to finish the row, pick up the empty tubs and start Sweet Becky in to the house. That would leave just about the right amount of slips to last the field hands till sundown. I could sit and cut slips or something until quittin’ time after I got back in.
When we got to the end of that last row at 5:45, Sweet Becky turned left instead of right like she would have to do to start another four row round trip and started back in without me doing a thing to tell her it was time to go. That damned mule understood English.
I was hungry and tired and about as ready to go in as she was. I had gotten pretty cocky about being an expert mule skinner by the end of the day even though I hadn’t much to do with where Sweet Becky went or what she did on the way there. After we picked up our last empty tubs, I untied the reins from the tub handle and held them in both hands just like Popeye did. I noticed that Gloria Perez was watching and I couldn’t resist showing off a little bit. I popped those reins on Sweet Becky’s rump and whooped, “Haaaagh – Mule! – Giddap!”
Sweet Becky “haaaaghed” and “giddapped” that sled right out from under me and left me in the plowed dirt sitting on my embarrassed dumb ass in a pile of empty slip tubs. She bolted like a quarter horse coming out of the gate at Ruidosa, jerking the sled out from under my feet and the reins out of hands before I knew what was happening. All I expected out of that lazy, little old lady mule was a fast walk or maybe a trot, but I sure wasn’t ready for no right-now gallop.
I got up an started after her but it wasn’t no use. There wasn’t no way for me to catch that fool mule and sled running through a plowed field or anywheres else for that matter. The sled was bouncing in the air hitting the ground every six or eight feet; just about the spacing between Sweet Becky’s thunderclap farts each time her rear legs went off the ground together in her funny looking mule-lope.
I kept running after her on the way in like I had a chance of catching her and making her stop. I stopped and picked up the reins that she had stepped on and broke as she left the field and turned on the shell road to the house. The bouncing sled knocked down the mailbox when she turned into the driveway leaving one of its runners laying alongside it. She hee-hawed and farted across the mowed grass of the yard gouging a ditch through the St. Augustine grass and Miz Shivers’ fern and herb bed with the bouncing wreckage of the sled on her way to the hackberry tree in the back yard. She hee-hawed the house for Popeye and stood there as calm as a settin’ hen with her head down, left foot up and her eyes half-closed.
“Earl, come out here this instant and look at what your fool mule has done. If that little boy has as much as a single scratch on him, you and that mule are going to be living together in the barn. Do you hear me!”
“Yeah, Winnie, I hear you and so does the rest of Artesia. Just hold your water, woman. Here comes Shavetail now. No worse for wear except for a red guilty face and a dirty butt.”
With that he runs up to Sweet Becky first and looks her over and then kicks what is left of the sled and mumbles something under his breath that I couldn’t make out but Miz Shivers could.
“Earl, if you take the name of the Lord in vain just once more today, I don’t know what I’ll do – but whatever it is, you will sure regret it.”
“Shavetail, did you try to drive Sweet Becky home after I told you not to? I told you to start her in and let her come by herself, didn’t I?”
“Yes sir to both questions and I am mighty sorry for it. Believe me I am and I ain’t ever gonna to do it again.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, but I know for damn sure you ain’t gonna to do it again with this mule or on this place. Here’s your wages and Mr. Speaker’s two bits. You both are fired.”
With that he reached five quarters out of his pocket and told me to go home and play the rest of the summer like a kid ought to in the first place.
Miz Shivers patted me on the head and said, “Tell your mamma I’ll see her just as soon as planting is over, you hear?”
“Yes ma’am and thank you for the nice dinner.”
Ronny and I went to Moller’s Pit fishing and skinny-dippin’ the next day and talked about how bad we felt getting fired from our very first outside job of farming for day wages.
We caught a few sun perch and a blue gill or two. The water was clear and cool – just right for swimming. While laying in the sun drying off, we talked about how much candy and soda water that cash money would buy us. Somehow Popeye’s treating us wrong got nudged right out of our heads.
Ain’t it something how being rich and comfortable can make you forget all about your troubles?
GROUNDING
Today I left my office,
glowing computer screens.
ringing phones and
demanding messages.
I drove to a house in the country,
haystacks,
pickups and
baa-ing sheep.
I broke a hay bale and fed the animals
I patted their thick, wooly backs
and tromped through pastures.
I drove back to the office
and worked with a grin on my face.
I have shit on my shoes,
and all is well.
RAKING WALNUTS
All animals are equal
but some animals are more equal than others
- George Orwell
Times are hard
for the squirrels.
Nuts are scarce
and dogs are plentiful.
As I rake walnuts
I’m reminded
of pigs and dogs
. . . in cahoots
shelling out misery
to dumber animals.
A wheel-barrel full
maybe. I’m guessing
just from the heap
its height and slump
not enough, really
even for pigs.
The squirrels sit:
bookends
atop the power pole
watching every stroke
of my rake, every walnut
flung on the canvas
the canvas dragged
before the pigs
who squint their royal
fat eyes and grunt
as I rub salt
on their walnuts
as if I were stroking
a warm ham.
WINDSICKNESS:
WHY MY FATHER NEVER MARRIEDHe had it:
a cancer so insidious
it killed tolerance first
and when nothing was
left to beat
not even the brow of a snake
he puffed himself up
into a storm of regretand cursed the wind:
the wind’s no good.
Half a chance
and it’ll steal your breath
from under your nose.
It’ll whirl
the hat off your head
and make your clothes dance
up close like a ghost
or a woman just blown
into townand when I came down
your mother wasn’t around.
SPAWNED-OUT
This is death, you know
the instinct
that steers the salmon
out of the ocean
and drives her upstream
to a gravel bar
where she wriggles
a nest for her redd.
Having done what
she could not dream
she turns crone, withers
anchors eel-like
among river bed stone
sets her lower jaw
fish-teeth gnawing water
she’s too weak to breathe.
And her roe waits for some jack
to roll the dice, to set
in motion alevin, parr, smolt –
the last good luck
for which her death
is hope.
BACK TO BONEMy mother gave birth standing up.
When her water broke, both boots filled.
She screamed. She always screamed.
But Dad never jumped
at the hook in her voice.
He let it fly
by his ear like bad advice.He had decided – long ago –
she’d have to reel herself in
get tough, or go down the road
to Bone. She toughened.
Gave birth to a nine-pound boy.Dad finished drilling winter wheat.
Unhooked the “three-point.”
Smashed his last good thumb.
They tried to save the nail, but
had to knife it out, clean
through the quick.That night, I lay between them
mixing tears and blood
the way they believed.
Not a sound.
Just my heart pounding:
country music in my ears.
IN PRAISE OF BLUE-EYED COWBOYS
Those eyes
catch me
by the bootstraps
flip me over once or twice
until dizzy as heck
I’m falling.
Those eyes
play cowboy songs
twang my heart strings
pick me black and blue
pluck my music.
Those eyes
look way down
into
the best part
of me –
my place of joy.
Touch me there!
Those eyes.
Oh, sweet Jesus.
Those eyes!
AND ROY ROGERS SANG THE TORAH
North we go a-roaming from Wyoming to Montana
All upon a tankful of George Custer’s diesel gas
Jesus may be savior on the local reservation
But still we eat our snow peas on the Powder River Pass
Eastward in the gloaming from Wyoming to Mt. Rushmore
Searching for the faces in the North Dakota night
Ripping down through Deadwood in the name of Rapid City
To see Abe Lincoln glowing in the cold arena light
The Seder means a shuffle low from Buffalo to Casper
Cruising for a synagogue and good unleavened bread
Jesus ain’t no savior on the old Ucross Foundation
And Jewish New York cowboys need a place to lay their heads
Gave us such a chilling there in Billings, South Montana
Tracts of propaganda from the non-semitic class
Bad to find such narrows in a land of sky-filled prairies
But still we eat our snow peas on the Powder River Pass
A CALL FOR WESTERNERS TO SAVOR THE RICH LAND LEGACY THAT IS THEIR BIRTHRIGHT
By Stewart Udall
From the archives of the Western Folklife Center, the following is a transcription by Deborah Fant of a talk given at the 17th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada on Saturday, February 3, 2001, sponsored by the Nevada Humanities Committee. Used with the permission.
Good afternoon.
I think I should begin by telling you why I’m here, why my wife and I came from Santa Fe. There are several reasons. One is that we have a long connection with the folklife movement in this country. My wife, some of you here know Joe Wilson, that wonderful Tennessee hillbilly, my wife joined with him over 20 years ago to revive the National Folk Festival and she played a very important role. She is well-organized and knows how to get the most out of people, and someone said, Joe Wilson, “Who’s that woman helping you? She’s sure a hundred-percenter,” And he said, “No, she’s a thousand percenter. She air conditioned Hell.”
I have been following this Gathering for some years. Hal Cannon has been an old friend of ours, and I think it has taken on the stature of a true national gathering. There isn’t anything like it. And I compared it with my wife to those stupid alumni gatherings at universities – this is a Gathering for the whole West. I wanted to get the feel of it, I wanted to hear the poetry. And since I was a child – you don’t know why or how this happens – I’ve had a fascination with poetry. I’m going to begin with a poem. It’s very simple, it’s what you poets out there know as haiku, except it’s American.
To make a prairie,
It takes a flower and a bee.
But flowers alone will do if bees are few.
It’s not my poem, it’s Emily Dickinson. You can just think of it, she never saw a prairie.
I’m going to recite it again.
To make a prairie,
It takes a flower and a bee.
But flowers alone will do if bees are few.
We’ve been here for three days. And apparently, judging by a couple of things I’ve seen in the press, some news arrives slow in Elko. I wanted to tell those who aren’t already familiar, I’m an old-timer, been around a long time. I went to Congress in the middle 1950’s. Most of the people are gone who I served in Congress with. One of my favorites was Alan Bible, a wonderful senator from Nevada. He was chairman of the Parks Subcommittee, and the national seashores and lakeshores that we put around the shoreline of the United States, he was primarily responsible for.
Forty years ago, two weeks ago today, I had started with President John F. Kennedy as Secretary of the Interior. I was the first person from Arizona to be in a President’s Cabinet. My wife and I had six children, and I was age 40, and that puts us in a category by itself. And then the President appointed Bobby. And we lost out.
Because I thought I had the best job in the Cabinet, I stayed for the full eight years. I am an environmentalist. I was part of the beginning of that movement. There are, I’m sure that you all recognize, various kinds and degrees of environmentalism. We don’t have a church and you don’t have to believe certain things. We’re all entitled to our own opinions.
Twenty-two years ago we went home. We went home because I decided to pick a fight with the federal government. And I’ve been fighting them for the past 22 years.
I was called by some of my Mormon relatives to drop off in St. George, Utah, because people thought there was too much cancer in the downwind area from the bomb tests. And I first had to investigate. The real fighters, by the way, were women. And they convinced me that there was something there. Soon thereafter I ended up representing uranium miners who had mined uranium.
These were the soldiers of the Cold War, these people, that were sacrificed. And the government lied to them. Lied. Lied. That there was no danger. And it looked the other way.
So I went to court. We had a big trial in Salt Lake. We had one with my Navajo uranium miners in Phoenix. We lost. We lost. I went to the Supreme Court of the United States, I didn’t get a vote. You cannot sue the sovereign, the old English principle. And then some good congressman and senators got together and legislation was passed, providing modest payments to these victims and these families.
And I was about to quit and retire last summer, I’m 81 as of this week, and I said I’ve got to continue to help finish the job. Because there’s still a lot of people who haven’t been taken care of.
So this last part of my life has been involved in writing books. I’ve written four. I’m going to talk about one or two here today. And in seeking justice – justice – from the United States of America.
Arizonans like to think we’re noted for straight talk. And I’m going to tell you my favorite political story of all stories. It’s a straight-talk story. Barry Goldwater ran for president, my brother ran for president, John McCain ran for president, an none of them got all that far. And they said, “They’re too frank. They’re too straight.” And those of you who don’t know, I’m going to tell you today, Sandra Day O’Conner, who was selected by President Reagan to be the first woman on the United States Supreme Court, was a ranch girl. Ranch girl. Her father, a man I met, was a rancher from Peloncillo Mountains west of Lordsburg – rugged country, hardscrabble. That’s where she grew up and spent her summers and a lot of other time, on the ranch. When Sandra was nominated for the Supreme Court, no one was more proud than Barry Goldwater, because the first Supreme Court woman Justice was going to be from Arizona. And two days later, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, you rememer him, he held a press conference and he said that this was a bad woman and a bad choice. That she had voted wrong on an abortion bill in the Legislature and, worse than that, she had been president of Planned Parenthood – some kind of subversive organization – for 10 years. He said he was sure President Reagan didn’t know these things, and if every good Christian would write or wire or call the White House, that he would withdraw this offensive name.
The reporters rushed over to Senator Goldwater’s office and informed of this. And of course, he was furious, and of course he didn’t budge an inch. He said, “Falwell doesn’t know what he talking about. Every good Christian should line up and kick Falwell’s ass.”
My brother and the friendship that we’ve had with Barry Goldwater, both Mo and Barry are gone now, is something I could tell you about but I don’t have time. But that was front page, and Mo, my brother, scribbled a note and had it hand-delivered over to Senator Goldwater’s office, and he said, “Barry: Terrific idea. But it won’t work. Falwell’s a good Christian – he’ll turn the other cheek.”
I have – maybe that’s one of the things that drew me to want to come and listen to the cowboy poets here – a limited cowboy heritage of my own. I grew up in a little Mormon-Catholic town, the only one like it right on the Arizona-New Mexico border. And my father, who was the county judge, owned a half-interest in a cattle ranch. I was 11, 12, along in there, and this is the early 30s, the Depression, and so I went out for two months every summer to be with the cowboys. And they had a horse and saddle for me, and my duties were wrangling the remuda in the morning, keeping the fire burning for the branding irons, and taking care of roasting the mountain oysters.
I learned something about cowboys, and I sort of found the same thing with the uranium miners. Both of these are the toughest jobs, in my view, the toughest jobs that there are. And the thing that’s characteristic is that you never heard them whine or complain. And whatever they had to do, they did it. And they were patient. If adversity hit them, they were strong. And so that’s what I learned early, and it stayed with me for a lot of my life.
I’m going to talk poetry for a minute, because one of the wonderful things that happened to Lee and I was that we became Robert Frost friends in Washington the last three years of his life. We were sort of his agents, and I wouldn’t say “manager,” nobody could manage him. But as I listened to J.B. Allen and Wally McRae and Brother Zarzyski and the rest of you, I thought of Frost, ‘cause I have all of the books that he ever wrote, and everything that’s been written about him. And I thought, there’s a commonality here. He was, some of us believe, one of the half-dozen great pastoral poets of all time. A pastoral poet is someone who writes about nature and people and the relationship of the land and people. Robert Frost, one of his lines: “The need to be versed in country things,” he said. And he wrote about, as you are writing about, country people and the human comedy, the human tragedy, the experiences that people have in an outdoor setting, working with animals, working with the land.
Frost’s poetry technique – he called it “the sound of sense” – was using the vernacular. The words that people used in ordinary conversation. I find it in the cowboy poets. That’s where the real poetry is: ordinary speech, ordinary lives. Folk phrases that are there. And while he wrote of rock walls and witches and death and home burial and the hired man, and all of those things, I see a similarity, and I welcome it. And I responded to it immediately.
Frost wrote me a letter. I was responsible, I guess, for getting President Kennedy to invite him to be the first poet, first poet, who was part of the Inaugural Celebration of the President of the United States. That’s a story that I won’t tell you about, but it’s there. And we went to Russia together. He went to see poets, I went to see the big hydroelectric dams. And he wrote me a letter that I prize. He said, here again is his language of the vernacular, he said, “I’m glad to have had you at my side in the last go-down.” And one of his phrases I always liked, it’s sort of impregnated itself into my life, he said, “There’s nothing like turning up somewhere else.” How about that?
So my last four books, each one is different. And I’m going to talk to you briefly today about two of them. Very briefly. One book I did is about the Spanish conquistadores. We have neglected sorely the Spanish history of this country. Coronado came in 1540, 2000 miles from Mexico City up the west coast, all the way to the Smoky Hill River in Kansas. The British – I’m British – the Dutch, the French, they sailed along the Atlantic coast and looked and claimed the land. The Spaniards immediately landed with these little ships and established horse farms in Cuba.
And the horses were part of the conquest of Mexico. And here they are, 20 years later, on horses. There were no horses in what is now the United States. There were no horses. The Spanish brought the horses. The horses changed the lives of the native people. They changed the lives of the settlers who came west, and it’s time that we gave them full credit. And some of the key people were Basques, such as Onate who led the expedition to New Mexico. Twenty-two years before the Pilgrims came ashore in Massachusetts, New Mexico was settled.
De Anza, a military man, led a party of settlers, families, 200 people and animals, from Culiacan to San Francisco to become the founder of San Francisco in 1776. The first great exploration of the United States west was not Lewis and Clark – though they got all the publicity. It was Escalante. And Dominguez. A small party set out by the governor of New Mexico to find a road to Monterrey. Well, the road to Monterrey was barred by the Sierra Nevada, if you know your geography. But they came into the Great Basin. They were the discoverers. Bolton, the historian, said they discovered more new country than Lewis and Clark and others. And so that’s part of their history.
My favorite Nevadan today, my favorite Nevada friend, is Robert Laxalt. I said don’t have me lecture, I’ll do what I did with Senator Goldwater in the last year of his life. I’ll come and we’ll have a conversation. I want to find out, by questioning him, more things about the Basques who came into this state. And if there’s any one book you haven’t read about the West that you should read, it’s Robert Laxalt’s book Sweet Promised Land, a book about his family and his father.
But my other book that I’m going to talk about briefly is my new book, Settlers: The Forgotten Founders. This book is about the Old West. My wife and I, all of our great grandparents were in that first wave. The Old West was from the time Marcus Whitman and his wife, bringing a cow and a sheep with them, went to Oregon in 1835 till the end of the Civil War. That was the Old West. The west of the movies has misled people and wiped out the real settlers. The heroes and heroines in my book are the people who dared to get in a wagon with their wives and their children and their belongings and cross 1000 or 2000 miles of unknown country to settle. That is the great heroic story, and that is what my book is about.
The theme that covers what they did concerns their sense of community and cooperation. The community, the welfare of the group, was more important than the individual. Just the opposite of our society today, all based on the individual, ‘go do your thing, make all the money you can, the hell with the rest.’ My grandfather and others were part of the second generation. And I feel that because I grew up without electricity and with horses and vegetable gardens and things like that, that I know a little bit about the 19th century. But this is an episode in our history. And I’m also, although I’m not supposedly a very religious person, I’m bringing the churches back into western history. They were vital. Not just the Mormons. The whole west, the Spanish part as well. But I just want to give you a little highlight:
My wife’s great grandfather, extraordinary man, his name is William Bailey Maxwell. He, as a young man, was part of that Mormon battalion that walked, that ragtag army, they didn’t even have uniforms, from Iowa to San Diego. And then to rejoin his family in Iowa, he and a few of his friends circled back to Salt Lake City where the first Mormon companies had come, and they went back to Iowa in the winter and almost died. They were saved by the Indians, who befriended them.
But this man ended up with a big ranch down near Pioche. I think he was the first sheriff of Lincoln County, Nevada. But he was a restless person. And before the end of his life, he was part of settling 13 different communities. Nevada and Utah and Arizona and on into Sonora. And that sort of exemplifies some of the qualities that these people had.
What made this such a strong generation was the way people worked together. The community. They had to, to build dams, canals, churches, schoolhouses. They were building from the ground up, and they knew they had to work together. And I saw the end result of this in my little hometown. And I’ve written this part of it, it’s in your program book.
It is a social truism that citizens police themselves when their lives intermingle every day. In my town, for example, this was the 1920s, 30s, the beloved midwife, who delivered me, by the way – Charlotte Sherwood – and the high school music teacher occupied a more vibrant place in the community than the sheriff. Think of that. And codes of conduct inculcated by churches had a stronger influence on behavior than laws enacted by distant legislatures.
Well, there’s a lot we still have to learn. And one of the things that came out of that environment was tolerance. And mutual respect. And a respect for intrinsic things. What a wonderful poetic word. Wally McRae uses it. Intrinsic. Get your dictionary out. It changes, it grows. Robert Frost was always looking for the right word. He’d put a poem aside and sometimes wait 20 years until he got the right word that he wanted for a poem.
But tolerance and mutual respect were important, and people settled their quarrels with fists most of the time. And what happened? What was the first state in the union to let women vote? Western state – Wyoming. I think they had the first governor, as a matter of fact, that was a woman. Even more startling, perhaps, three western states, I wonder if you knew this, had Jewish governors 50 years before New York. Three states: Idaho, Utah, New Mexico. How did that happen? Because people looked at the intrinsic worth of a human being. And that was it – that was it. And so, I love that word, intrinsic.
This is the end of an Emily Dickinson poem. I think this is about a father, a brother, someone, who’s a marvelous person in a family setting but didn’t achieve prominence, didn’t run for political office or something, and Emily Dicjenson wrote this end line:
Lay the laurel on the one too intrinsic for renown.
Think of that for a moment.
So, those are some of the things that I have been concentrating on. You get into your 70s and 80s and think, because you’ve seen more things and had more experiences, that you know more than other people do, or at least you can pretend you do. And I have a verse I’m going to read that expresses, or that bolsters, this theory for us old people. It’s Biblical. It’s anonymous, by the way, a friend of mine who arrived at 70 a few years ago gave it to me with the title, “How Did I get Here So Fast?” It’s about King Solomon and King David.
King Solomon and King David lived very merry lives,
With very many concubines and very many wives.
Until old age came creeping, with very many qualms;
Then Solomon wrote the proverbs, and David wrote the Psalms.
I believe I’m emboldened to prophesy a little bit, and what’s happening in California is just the front edge, my friends. These big sprawling cities. I won’t even mention their names, you know them, you don’t live there, I hope, none of you. We fled Phoenix a while back when it was succeeding in trying to be another Los Angeles. But they’re in deep trouble. Not just electricity – energy, water, having dependence on the automobile, all of this. The healthy part of the national tissue is small town America. Small communities. The rural areas of the country. I’m making that as sort of a prediction here today.
And I think all of you at this Gathering, despite the quarrels about grazing, may have more of the respect of the nation, and may get more as we go down the road, because they respect your love of the land, your love of animals, the tenacity, the character that has kept you on the land. They like your thrift. Which is sort of another forgotten word in this society we live in.
Well, I’m going to conclude with a poem that I wrote. Our great grandparents included people that some of you would know if I mentioned names, came into the Great Basin. They were in this first wave of settlers. Most of them Brigham Young sent south, which my friend Juanita Brooks, the historian, said was a kind of Siberia. But they went, and they stayed there. And there, in that area, happened what Wallace Stegner, a historian, said – and I knew it was true before he said it – was the greatest tragedy in the western history. The Mountain Meadows Massacre.
My middle name is Lee. My great grandfather was involved. A group of pioneers, the majority women and children, were going from Arkansas to California, and they had 600 head of cattle that they were driving. And though events that even now you find it hard to explain – stupidity, zealotry, paranoia, God-knows-what – there was a massacre. The little kids were saved, they were sent back. And it became known to the families in Arkansas. There was an enmity there that was hard to believe.
A little over ten years ago, two men, one from my family and one from an Arkansas family, began talking. And then they got meetings going. The people who were massacred had been buried in shallow graves. Nothing had ever been done. And I got involved in this. I think there’s never been an event like this in the West. We finally decided, if we put aside all accusations, if we expressed forgiveness, that we could come together and have a ceremony. So we gathered. After 137 years, we gathered, we privately met. There was a ceremony, the president of the Mormon Church, bless him, came. And we had what amounted to a burial ceremony. There’s a monument erected with the names down near St. George, Utah. Go by and see it sometime if you’re interested.
And I described it in a verse that I wrote because this had haunted southern Utah, still does, perhaps. It had haunted my family, I can tell you. So I described in my own effort – poetic words – how this happened. And I close with these words:
Now the families come
Arm in arm,
To share a burial ceremony.
The balm they bring is love:
The only ointment God offers
To heal unhealable wounds.
Thank-you.
OIL
Soft rainsqualls on the swells
south of the Bonins, late at night. Light
from the empty mess-hall
throws back bulky shadows
of winch and fairlead
over the slanting fantail
where I stand.
but for men on watch in the engine room,
the man at the wheel, the lookout in the bow,
the crew sleeps. in cots on deck
or narrow iron bunks down drumming
passageways below.
the ship burns with a furnace heart
steam veins and copper nerves
quivers and slightly twists and always goes -
easy roll of the hull and deep
vibration of the turbines underfoot.
bearing what all these
crazed, hooked nations need:
steel plates and
long injections of pure oil.
GS 1958 western pacific
REEDS
"Why should we cherish all sentient beings?
Because sentient beings
are the roots of the tree of awakening.
The Bodhisattvas and the Budhas are the flowers and fruits.
Compassion is the water for the roots."
-Avatamsaka Sûtra
I A Beach in Baja
“…on the twenty-eighth day of September 1539, the very excellent
Señor Francisco de Ulloa, lieutenant of the Governor and captain of the
armada by grace of the most illustrious Señor Marques de Valle de
Oaxaca, took possession of the bay of San Andres and the Bermeja Sea,
that is on the coast of this new Spain toward the north, at thirty-three
and a half degrees, for the said Marques de Valle in the name of the
Emperor our King of Castille, at the present time and in reality,
placing a hand on the sword,
saying, that if anyone contradicts this
he is ready to defend it;
cutting trees with his sword,
uprooting grass,
removing rocks from one place to another,
and taking water from the sea;
all as a sign of possession.
… - I, Pedro Palenzia, notary public of this armada, write what
happened before me.”
II Kadekaman.
Cadeu Caamanc.
“Creek Reed” : San Ignacio
(aggava. hawk aggvacaamanc creek of the hawks)
Señora Maria Leree is ninety-eight years old
rests in a dark cool room at full noon.
A century-old grapevine covers the house. Casa Leree.
“she still tries to tell me what to do”
– her daughter Rebecca
lived forty-five years in Los Angeles.
Dagobert drives a beer truck all day every day
and some nights,
from Guerrero Negro to San Ignacio.
Says the salt works at Guerrero Negro
Sell most of their salt to Japan;
Rebecca plays the mandolin
“I need some music down here.”
Dagobert trucks beer to ranches
all through central Baja
over those rutted roads.
“I have six kids in Guaymas. I
Get over to see them three days a month”
South of El Arco
a hummingbird’s nest with four eggs;
four Mexican black hawks
a caracara on the top of a cardón
a bobcat crossing the truck track at twilight
a wadi full of cheeping evening birds
Cats walk the fan-palm roof.
Her two sons are painters.
– “I am a poet.”
“You came down here to Baja for
– inspiration? Poeta?”
Yes, on these tracks. Rising early.
Dry Leather. Deep wells.
Where we breathe, we bow.
III Eat Your Self
The bulls of Iberia – Europa loves the Father;
India loves the big-eyed Mother Cow.
In the Thyssen Gallery in Madrid there is a painting by Simon Vouet – “The
Rape of Europa” – from about 1640. The white bull is resting on the ground,
the woman sweetly on his back. A cheerful scene, two serving women, three
cherubs, stand by to help this naked lady and the handsome eager bull. His
big eyes are looking up and back, flowers twined around his horns. The
Goddess giving herself over to huge male energy? making modern Europe
with its states and wars?
Bony cows of Baja.
Body of grass, forbs, brush, browse.
Dried meat. Charqui “jerky”;
(Little church up the arroyo.
Leathery skinny twisted ropy Christ
figure racked to dry)
Quechua ch’arki:
Dried to keep, good years and bad –“With this meat, I thee wed”
the MUSCLE dried jerked meat
the SKIN shoes, saddles, sheaths
the BONE buttons
the FAT buckets of lard
HORNS & HOOVES glue.
loose vulva, droopy udder
the MILK babesbony old cow scratching
horn head on a mesquite limb –
Sweet grass breath
spiraling outward.– the hoof of the cow is a track of the grasslands
the print in the grass is the hoof of a cow –her BREATH life
mother bos
in her green-grass body at
Arroyo de Camanjue – arroyo of reeds –(old rancherias called
idelcagomó – creek of the large ranges
cahelulevit – running water
idelibinagá – high mountain
idelabuú – plateau of the mountains)The elderly ragged bearded vaquero
coming down the track. On his dusty horse.
“Command me!” with elegance.“Adiós!” with such finality.
“Go with God!”With this meat I thee feed
with this flesh I thee wed.
This is an earlier version of “With This Flesh”
from Mountains and Rivers Without End.
HUSKING
It is arcane knowledge,
and if you seen one, you’ve seen them all,
the small hooks
attached to leather straps
hunkered in a box of tools
at farm sales.
Like reaching into a well for moonlight,
I select one, wipe off the dust
with a month to spare.
When my father unwraps the present,
his 77th birthday, hands swollen, covered
with liver spots, puffy fingers tugging
the bright paper, I catch
his sheer recognition,
the faint smile, the backwater
of sun stirred silver by minnows.
He centers the hook in the palm of his hand,
fastens the straps,
and I am told again
how it was done,
walking beside the horse-drawn wagon,
stumbling over stones,
the dry stalks a stairway winding
away from words,
how the ear was grabbed, hooked,
shucked in one flying motion,
and tossed, rows of golden teeth bared,
against the bangboard
to drop into the creaky-axeled wagon,
how hands grew numb in gloves
made with two thumbs because a thumb
wore out quicker than the rest of the glove,
how the breath was white clouds,
the snakes deep underground,
tangled like old harness,
how the pheasants slinked soundlessly away
like pickpockets in a crowd,
how there was a need to be perfect,
miss none,
because times were hard.
We sit, mute, exhausted from the field’s raw vowels,
longing, separating.
CONFERENCE
I draw a dozen breasts
on a wide sheet of paper,
give them wings & try
to disguise them as airplanes – fashioning
nosecones & propellers from the nipples.
But Mrs. Gray notices anyway
& my mother is called for an afterschool conference.
I’m outside on the emptied playground while they talk,
the chains of the swing
taut with my young weight.
There is a cottonwood tree
next to the swingset, & I try to rise
high into the opinion of leaves
where secret voices would tell me
what I should and shouldn’t do.
I think of Adrian dressing the indignant cat
in a gingham doll-dress. I think
of the scarecrow that wears my grandfather’s hat & count
the five clear notes of the churchbell down the road.
I wonder what it’s like to be the fish
swallowed by the larger fish. Then my mother
is walking toward me. “What happens now?” I say.
She lights a cigarette
& settles into the swing-seat next to me.
She doesn’t say anything but points
to the pale, indefinite moon
that floats above the cottonwood.
She exhales a sigh of smoke
& then pushes off from the sand, beginning a sway.
“See the moon up there?” she says, “Let’s see
if I can touch it with my feet.”
SHOSHONEANEvery thing that roamed this world
had a song of its own.The sky was something to be thought about.
Way out this way. Way out that way.Black night. Black night.
This was on Coyote Lung Mountain,when animals & humans
spoke the same language.Blackbird, black seed, black obsidian bead.
And all things echoedlike an owl’s call in the black night,
every thing that roamed this world.I myself am going back, he said.
Going back, he said.Black night. Blackbird.
I myself am going back,back to Coyote Lung Mountain.
Way out this way. Way out that way.
A COWBOY’S LARGER MEANING OF DOWNTOWN L.A.
While listening to
Robert Hardy read Wells’
War of the Worlds on cassette,
it came to him fast, like
the quickened gallup of a
range-weary palomino, that writers,
they mostly believe they’re here
to be wisdom’s conduits, here to
say things that’ll give a heart
solace, a mind high flights
of fancy, give a whole populace
the most demographically wide-spread
prosperity possible, think they’re
here to teach us love’s three
sweet mysteries (the why and how
and best time of day to die
a dignified drunk in downtown L.A.),
share with us the larger meaning
of a largely meaningless life
they say is ours, short of a
good fit in cowboys’ boots.
But nary one wise word
is heard as to the efficacy of a
steaming broad-brimmed bowl
of kidney beans, a great big huge
wedge of hot-buttered cornbread
cooked barely above a just-right flame
flickering, like cactus made of
fireflies, in a little tucked-away
New Mexico mesa where the sun’s
just gone down.
CHARLIE GOODNIGHT. By Andy Wilkinson (Grey Horse Press, 1994. 5205 92nd Street, Lubbock, TX 79424-4313). CD and cassette with accompanying book, $30.
It’s possible that the particular rhymes and tempos of folk and country music are such that songwriters in those circles are simply able to craft epics in the space of one song effectively enough to abstain from the need for larger cycles in their work. One recalls, for instance, Carl Sandburg’s famous remark upon first hearing “Buffalo Hunters” that the song was a perfectly complete novel.
There certainly haven’t been any Nashville or Austin based projects to match so-called rock operas like TOMMY, JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR or THE LAMB LIES DOWN ON BROADWAY. Surely the reason has not been a lack of epic depth and breadth in American history, especially in the West.
Andy Wilkinson’s CHARLIE GOODNIGHT arrives then as quite a departure from the writing traditions of its root musical influences, at least in terms of its visionary structure. One serious close listening should be enough to disrupt the complacency of any writer previously content with self-contained songs – although most of this album is composed of songs that hold up well as individual pieces. As a unified work, it haunts a listener's sense of the past with power far beyond the sum of its parts.
Wilkinson chooses to tell the life and times of the great pioneer cattleman from an impressionistic, as opposed to strictly realistic, stance. That’s not to say that documented history isn’t strictly adhered to, nor that a chronological narrative sequence is absent. His songs inhabit the emotional history of the events he describes rather than a scholarly perspective. This song cycle doesn’t replace the Haley biography – it enhances and even enlightens it.
There are no weak songs on this album, no moments that feel like filler or partially realized tunes rushed into production to meet a release deadline. Wilkinson has chosen to vary the sonic experience of the cycle via the addition of several guest vocalists in key roles, allowing the narrative focus to shift to other figures populating the Goodnight legend. The Maines family must be one of the musical heritage treasures of this country. In addition, to the great Lloyd Maines's superb production and guitar work, his daughter Natalie and sister La Tronda sing lovely leads on “White Women’s Clothes” and “A Woman’s Life,” respectively.
“An Eye On the Boss,” sung by Buck Ramsey, makes a damned close run at humming the magical refrain of the Goodnight-Loving Trail away from Bruce Phillips’s classic song. “Voices From The Grave” may well be the most important song in this collection, its modal overtones eerily evoking the sound of a sea-chanty. One of the most ardently overlooked influences on Cowboy Poetry are the great work-song traditions of the sailing ships of the 18th and 19th centuries. Texas is, of course, both cattle range and sea coast, a phenomenon a very few writers (Guy Clark and Robert Earl Keen come to mind) in Western-country music have noted. No one has taken the notion quite this far before. Consider the impact of British investment in the Texas cattle industry – consider that “Lasca,” the preeminent Texas classic cowboy poem, was written by an Englishman. There is a powerful amount of possibility in making the British connection for Cowboy poets, and Andy Wilkinson has struck a monster first chord toward doing it.
The price of the package includes both CD and cassette. The book that accompanies them is written and illustrated in impeccable taste, including notes, credits, a bibliography for further reading, striking portraits of the guest musicians (a special mention for Deward Campbell’s artistic contribution is required here), even a map of the area that concerned Goodnight during his career is included. In conception, execution and just general intent, this is one of the outstanding projects yet produced by the Cowboy cultural renaissance.
COWBOYS & IMAGES. By William Matthews. Callaway Editions, 1994. 136 pages. $40
According to the editor’s introduction, William Matthews has only been painting cowboys since 1985. This seems amazing, although the timelessness of the settings he uses, and of the images that emerge from them, appear to exist somewhere outside any specific chronological pressure. Had watercolor been a medium of wider choice 100 years ago, these pictures could have possibly been rendered then.
But probably not. Matthews’s place in the pantheon of great Western American art owes a tremendous debt to his watercolor technique, even beyond his unquestioned technical mastery of papers and paint. It’s almost impossible to imagine an artist employing traditional oils, and being influenced in any capacity by academy notions of proper composition, actually choosing to allow so much open space around his subjects. Although Matthews’s work has been accepted as an authentic expression by a culture whose innate aesthetic conservatism goes without saying, his willingness to allow the very paper he paints upon to serve the function of the sweeping vistas of Western landscape is an innovation that has some important resonances with the wilder frontiers of modern conceptual artforms. His pictures look as though they could have been painted alongside Remington and Russell and Seltzer, but of course they weren’t, and could not have been – they are clearly contemporary works, and it’s just that enigma that makes them great.
In no way does this imply that Matthews is insensitive to the power of the actual landscape in cowboy life. This volume reproduces a number of his formal landscapes that are remarkable (viewed alongside the context of his intense studies of form, shape and movement in human figures) for their total absence of broadbrimmed bipeds ahorseback in the foreground. It’s a subtle, yet succinct example of why Matthews is unlikely to ever win a medal from the Cowboy Artists of America in the same career that finds him acclaimed the leading painter of cowboys by the cowboys themselves. For once, a western artist has managed to portray the effect of landscape on its supposed citizens without having to rope the two together every frame of the way. I expect most working cowboys see a lot of country free of cowboys standing in their line of vision all of the time, a phenomenon that rarely finds an appreciative vision in most of the Western art that sells in Santa Fe or Scottsdale. It certainly comes together between the covers of this collection.
COWBOYS & IMAGES features 104 color reproductions, a useful biographical introduction by Dyan Zaslowsky, and a clever bit of MC Ranch story recycling by William Kittredge.
Kittredge’s position as one of the finest composers of prose in the West, a prose that nevertheless reads with the verve of an oral spontaneity, probably owes more to his ranch background than he realizes, given his subsequent academic training. It’s odd to see his writing here, not from a careerist standpoint, but from the constant ambiguity of Kittredge’s attitude toward a culture he just as soon see vanish, albeit with the boss’s son’s prerogative of having the last word via his memoirs. Kittredge’s contradictions in this respect are truly epic, and perhaps through the obtaining of flashy clips like this his sensibility is slowly shifting to allow the possibility that ranch culture wasn’t necessarily finished circa WWII. For the most part, William Matthews’s portfolio is the antithesis of Kittredge’s career-long elegy for a lifestyle he just couldn’t cut as a hand on the range. As a hand on the page, he is tops – one wonders if writing like the piece included here is part of a very long gather at the farthest reaches of the field.
TULARE DUST: A Songwriter’s Tribute to Merle Haggard. Various Artists, Produced by Tom Russell and Dave Alvin (Hightone Records, 1994. 220 4th St. #101, Oakland, CA 94607). CD and cassette.
The so-called “tribute album” has become an increasingly visible product on recording shop racks. Few of them have enjoyed the visionary spirit of the pioneer of the form’s projects (I refer to producer Hal Willner, whose compilations honoring, for instance, Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weil and the music of the films of Walt Disney have resulted in one of the most idiosyncratic catalogs in modern sound anthology). Still, it’s hard to miss if a great subject is selected, and sometimes a masterpiece is possible with lesser-known material. Before I found a copy of TULARE DUST, my vote for the most successful (i.e., challenging but relistenable) tribute album after Willner’s collections was BEAT THE RETREAT, based on the songs of British folk-rock pioneer Richard Thompson.
TULARE DUST must not be confused with the album MAMA’S HUNGRY EYES, a parallel project that uses interpretations of Haggard’s songs by a herd of (mostly) new Nashville stars. With the exception of Willie and Emmylou (and, perhaps not so surprising given his pre-celebrity chops as an instrumentalist, Vince Gill), MAMA’S HUNGRY EYES demonstrates just how soul-deadening the production values of modern Nashville are. Haggard was recently quoted describing the new country music as “rock’n roll filtered through milktoast.” It’s hard for even his songs to survive such degradation, and that’s just what happens with the major label job.
Haggard remains one of the truly great writers in country music, possibly the greatest to have emerged West of Texas. It’s appropriate that the business of reclaiming the soul of his music in this decade should wind up on the frets of some of the best young songwriters to have evaded Nashville the past generation.
The clearest difference is the dramatically scaled-back production values of TULARE DUST. Keyboards are only used twice in 15 tracks (on MAMA’S HUNGRY EYES, only Vince Gill kept a piano out of the studio, and it helps), drums on only half of them. Most of the rest comprise ensembles of three or less players, including aching solo guitar contributions from Dwight Yoakum (the one really big name on the record) and Steve Young (whose version of “Shopping for Dresses” might be the stand-out tune of the entire sequence).
There are so many marvelous moments included here, the best advice is to just buy the album and discover them for oneself. My favorites have tended to shift around, which is probably the highest compliment one can give a project such as this. It has tremendous depth and balance, and the individual tracks have quite a magical tendency to enhance each other without detracting from the integrity of their own moment, which is some trick in this variety of endeavor.
I’m real fond of Joe Ely’s hard-driving take on “White Line Fever,” which I used to overlook in my previous fondness for Robert Earl Keen’s “Daddy Frank” which immediately precedes it. Tom Russell displays a killer roots-country vocal (for a New Yorker particularly) on the title track, and co-producer Dave Alvin closes the disc with a moving, spooky rendition of “Kern River.” Some of the most authentic sounding performances actually were recorded in Nashville, although Iris Dement, Lucinda Williams, and Billy Joe Shaver are generally renowned for their lack of interest in playing that Top-40 country style.
It’s enlightening to note how may of these performers have the L.A. punk rock scene in their backgrounds – Alvin, Peter Case and especially X’s John Doe. I almost wish Doe’s version of “Silver Wings” (from a long out-of-print side project from the early 80’s revealing the country influence in the roots rock mix) had been used instead of Marshall Crenshaw’s overdubbed take. The strangest cut here is Rosie Flores’s sugary sweet interpretation of “My Own Kind of Hat.” The boldest is Barrance Whitfield’s “Irma Jackson,” which very beautifully and very subtly restates the humanity of the original.
This is a great collection, and it’s a fine introduction to a number of writers whose work deserves far more attention than commercial networks allow.
BETWEEN EARTH & SKY: Poets of the Cowboy West. Edited by Anne Heath Widmark. Photographs by Kent Reeves (New York, Norton, 1995).
Norton & Co. is renowned in the publishing industry for its long delays in getting new titles into print. The unfortunate advance copy of this anthology sent to reviewers somewhat enforced the notion that it had, as Jack Aubrey would say, “missed its tide.” The critical omission from the bound galley’s was Kent Reeves’s photographs, leaving one to form an opinion based only on the text. In that state, the poetry read like yesterday’s papers, Anne Widmark’s biographical profiles seemed oddly suspended in space, and a truly mawkish Foreward jingle-jangled cowboy clichés with the vengeance of a Hallmark card.
Which is a roundabout way of noting I’m glad I didn’t review BETWEEN EARTH & SKY prior to experiencing the finished product, because its power is fully located in a vision that requires all three components – poetry, prose and photographs – to adequately express itself. The result is, by a long distance, the most personally in-depth, emotionally charged yet somehow objectively balanced appreciation of the “poetry of the cowboy West” yet gathered.
The 12 poets selected for inclusion tend to favor the more progressive trends in Cowboy Poetry – they certainly represent much of the cutting edge in terms of an active, working concern with poetics as a cultural vocation. Given the completed perspective of the book, an interesting sort in the material chosen to represent the actual literature has taken place, from the inescapable “Reincarnation” to a probable one-time rarity like “Song Notes for Ian Tyson.” Of the 11 writers associated with the movement as it has generated from Elko, the presence of Joel Nelson is particularly astute given his preference for promoting the classic repertoire in his public appearances. His own compositions, painstakingly grounded in traditional technique, rank near the top of contemporary balladstyle poetry, and deserve to be more widely circulated.
The 12th poet is Drummond Hadley, whose influence as a cowboy poet elder is long overdue (and despite numerous previous attempts to include his work in other anthologies). He is the most important and authentic cowboy culture poet with the least amount of recognition within the culture itself. Even blaming this on his legendary reticence as a writer (few poets in America in any genre have avoided promoting their work as thoroughly as Hadley, whose lack of regard for publishing, answering mail, hobnobbing, etc. is epic), one still feels the grave absence of a vital link in Western literature. Hadley is a living connection to the entire alternative canon of modern American poetry, and the relationship of that canon to the intuitive poetics of the rural West is quietly demonstrated throughout this volume.
He was present at the first Elko Gathering, but apparently felt his use of open forms precluded the audience’s attentions at that time, at least as defined by the academic disciplines that had organized the event. The terse, no nonsense anecdotal pieces Hadley performed a scant handful of times during that visit would continue to be in the vanguard of oral-tradition performance poetics at Elko even a decade later. So too would be his physical impulses, preferring to fire an actual blank on the nightshow stage, an astonishing visceral contrast to Baxter Black’s use of prerecorded gunshot effects some Gatherings later. The poems included here are closer to more lyrical rhythms of his previously published, long out-of-print 3 collections (the bibliography omits THE SPIRIT BY THE DEEP WELL TANK, Goliard, 1972), yet anyone willing to read their graceful long lines aloud will experience a striking reassessment of any previous assumption regarding the need for rhyme as the ultimate arbiter of the oral tradition.
Kent Reeves’s photographs employ rough angles and framings, occasionally off-center their subjects, improvise on available light and settings, and present settings that look like real dirt and sky (never postcards). Seldom has the relationship between poet and land been made so acutely clear via such artful indirection – the effect of the total portfolio of pictures (5 per poet, though concerned with working/living environment as much as formal portraiture) is a quite revolutionary advance in the pictorial representation of ranch culture. If the high-energy exuberance of Paul Zarzyski’s line could somehow be distilled into Vess Quinlan’s tacit images, the result might come out looking like these marvelous sepia toned fragments from a pastoral holograph.
Beyond even the technical beauty of the pictures, there exists an indefinable magic in the portraits. I know all of these poets, am friends with most of them and close to more than a few, and there are portraits here that taught me more about these people than I ever guessed I knew.
They’re expectedly what was required to put Anne Widmark’s succinct biographical essays over the top, given that the writing and the photographs were generated from the same visits to the poet’s home landscapes. She fills in and enlarges on the visual imagery while moving the focus of the project into other concerns not always addressed by anthologies (even while possibly assumed by them). The influence of other writers outside Cowboy poetry, odd bits of personal histories, the effect of the ongoing community on these poets with informal comments and her own observations, result in remarkably insightful assessments that read as all too short. The full impact of the project is revealed through these chapters as a personal odyssey inseparably hinged to the emergence of a new voice of the literary rural West, and it succeeds finally as an important and unique contribution to that voice, while setting a new standard for anyone wishing to present it in any future collection.
HONY-TONK CANTOS AND DRUNKARD’S DREAMS. By Kell Robertson. (PsychoTex books, P.O. Box 47071, Ft. Worth, TX 76147. 1994) 34 pp, $5 regular edition, $10 signed.
Kell Robertson’s career, and the actual body of writing that has emerged from it, generally offers one of the most troubling and enigmatic conundrums in contemporary Western American Literature. The impact of its puzzle on modern Cowboy poetry is even more astute.
He has been an intimate of western American small press from its inception. His first book, TOWARD COMMUNICATION, was issued by the seminal Grande Ronde Press in La Grande, OR in 1967. The nearly three decades since have produced about a dozen more collections, mostly small chapbooks and pamphlets in very small press runs, not impossible to find yet fairly scarce. Some of these reprint occasional poems from earlier volumes, while it’s not at all unusual to find lost or uncollected work by Robertson in various fugitive journals and long-extinct literary magazines of the era.
“Fugitive” is a fine word for describing Robertson’s position in current letters, serving both as an adjective and noun while having nothing to do with the conservative New Critics who originally applied the concept to their concerns in the 1930’s and 40’s. “Outlaw” might be another. Robertson was a C&W singing redneck in the very midst of the North Beach hippie scene in the 60s, a poet for whom Hank Williams and THE WILD BUNCH were as profound and important an influence as the poetry of Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Keith Wilson, during a time when none of the above were especially fashionable in the circles he was plowing through.
Robertson has indeed left powerful impressions on his various audiences and literate compadres, a remarkably high percentage of whom now refuse to let him near their homes. From one perspective, his restlessness, his itinerant troubadour’s journeying throughout this country and Mexico echoes the earlier example of Woody Guthrie. From another view, his obsession with paralleling and exploiting the great mythologies of the West has led him into a life of contrived squalor and caricatured tragedy. Never as primal in his intellectual engagements as his legend, with much encouragement on his own part, has often insisted, his self-edited, hand-crafted mimeo mag DESPERADO (nine issues from the late 1960s, with a fine tenth issue emerging in 1992) made a stunning, wholly intuitive and historical early case for the interrelationships between urban street and Western rural poetry. As Thomas McGuane once observed, however, there is a critical difference between being a desperado, and being truly desperate. Whatever real damage Robertson has done to himself in pursuing his muse, there remains an element of bravado in his writing that borders on posturing. What makes it so important and compelling is that no one has taken it quite so far as he has, in its specific guise of a rambling gunfighter with a guitar. The small but effective body of work he has left to mark his passage is fraught with lessons in the perils of image mongering.
At his absolute best (if you can find a copy, in BEAR CROSSING, Guerilla Poetics, 1990), Robertson establishes a vision of the West simultaneously imploding from the force of its own mythology while somehow surviving just beyond the ability of mankind’s power to control it. He has a deep sympathy for our degraded open lands, and the wildlife that is being destroyed as a side effect of development, of the new race to stake a claim in the Wild West. Such poems owe much of their force to Robertson’s quandary as a man himself consumed with that chase, however more “authentic” his own position is. It’s like a vast metaphor for the archetypal Last Hunter killing the Last Elk, destroying himself in the very process of being most true to the purest drives of his person.
This is the specific demon that Robertson appears to pursue and be pursued by. HONKY-TONK CANTOS AND DRUNKARD’S DREAMS is a less successful version of that dynamic, given the understandable tendency to perhaps romanticize the deromanticized situation of being down-and –out – which is how I would define “posturing” in this instance, although the line between actual and supposed circumstances, between, say, an alcoholic’s disease and the amount of self-knowledge he possesses in being possessed by it, is impossible to accurately define while remaining evident.
This is still a must-have volume, if no other reason than it’s the only readily available collection of Robertson’s poetry around right now. It also happens to be a physically beautiful tribute to the outlaw small press aspect of his career, reproducing the poems from original typed proofs, the various typewriters in various font sizes depending on the length of the piece. The poems themselves are closer to notebook fragments or meditations that they are to the fuller narratives that characterize Robertson’s most lasting work, but single lines and images continue to reverberate. The inscription Robertson put on my copy of BEAR CROSSING (the only time we’ve met, in Durango, 1992) could have appeared here somewhere. Since it doesn’t, I offer it as a previously unpublished example of the warring duality he tries to address more directly in this volume than anywhere else in his ouvre:
I will never know
what my heart is
but I can hear it
SING
And of course there are a few moments here where the collision of a specific time in space and a few overheard words put the scary West of our present and future into a moment no other American poet of his generation has managed with such a casual yet devastating command of vernacular irony (a poem of the same title in BEAR CROSSING being one of the most powerful pieces in a powerful book):
TAOS PLAZA
In the yellow information booth
with flowers painted on it
the lady with all the Navajo silver
and turquoise hanging around
her fat neck, tells the people
from New Jersey to pay no
attention to
panhandling Indians.
“You give them an inch
they’ll take a mile,”
she smiles.
She is a nice lady.
Her husband owns an art gallery
she says
they hang Navajos all the time.
THE QUINTESSENCE OF QUIETUDE
Stunned by the silence,
awed by the immensity of the surroundings,
with unshed tears of joy,
I know what I am doing &
where I am.
Knowing that my quiet is my
most important & valuable possession,
I revel in my newly-found valley,
enclosed by mountains & grazing-fields,
protected by icy roads, &
Canopied by limitless sky. Am
welcomed by raptors encircling,
challenged by critters burrowing, but
entertained by creatures scurrying –
the eloquence of solitude !
Early-on confused, abused by urban noise;
missing the barely known georgia cotton field
of the barely-known granddaddy once in hand;
yet knowing of all this missing, but
deeply missing something…
I know this: my love for this
bit of land, this northwest earth
I now call “home”,
is firm, is final, is that long-sought-for
missing something…the quintessence of solitude.
With sustained noise, chaos reigns. (1)
Now in solitude – away from the clamor,
the cacophony of teeming masses;
Now in quietude – able to listen, to hear
that missing something…the eloquence of silence.
The most companionable silence… (2)
the ultimate trusting of self, to be alone
with the wind, with the memories,
with newly-found harmony…
& to be a caretaker, preserver, of that silence.
Silence precedes the profound
& attends the emotions; (3)
is beyond the mind, is
rapture, is golden, is
an enchanted place, & (4)
Having left behind the blasts of agitation,
having cast-off such mental chaos,
body & mind rest from wandering, finally,
discovering in the quintessence of silence
harmony’s eloquent hum of quietude…that speaks to me.
(1) okri (2) thoreau (3) melville (4) iyer
April 23, 2005
April 23, 2005
Considered for review IF Dry Crik Review publishes another issue:
FIVE DOLLAR BILL. By Corb Lund (Corb Lund Music, 2002. www.corblundband.com)
CD $20.
HAIR IN MY EYES LIKE A HIGHLAND STEER. By Corb Lund (Stony Plain Recording Co. Ltd., 2005. www.stonyplainsrecords.com) CD $20.
HOTWALKER. By Tom Russell (Hightone Records, 2005. 220 4th St. #101 Oakland, CA 94607 www.hightone.com) CD $16.
ELKO! A COWBOY'S GATHERING. Various Artists (Western Jubilee Recording Co. LLC., 2005. P.O. Box 9187, Colorado Springs, CO 80932 www.dualtone.com) 2 CDs $22.
MARIPOSA WIND. By Mike Beck (Reata Records, P.O. Box 242, Lavina, MT 59046 www.mikebeck.com)
CD $16.
ALASKA FISHIN' TUNES. By John van Amerongen [(206) 567-4575] CD $15
6th FISHER POETS' GATHERING 2003. By Various Artists [(206) 567-4575] CD $15?
STORIES FROM NATIVE AMERICA. Produced by Taki Telonidis and Hal Cannon with Commentary by Hank Real Bird (Deep West Recordings, 2004. Western Folklife Center, 501 Railroad, Elko, NV 89801 www.westernfolklife.org) CD $15.
Considered for review IF Dry Crik Review publishes another issue:
VOICE OF THE BORDERLANDS. By Drum Hadley (Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2005. Tucson, AZ 2005. www.rionuevo.com) 368 pages. Hardcover $29.95.
12/20/07: Review from Kyhl Lyndgaard, University of Nevada, Reno: Download file
COWBOY ETHICS: What Wall Street Can Learn from the Code of the West. By James P. Owen, Photography by David R. Stoecklein (Stoecklein Publishing & Photography, 2004. P.O. Box 856, Ketchum, ID 83340 www.drsphoto.net) 80 pages. Hardcover $35.
AND THEN I WROTE. By Tom Russell & Sylvia Tyson (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995. 103-1014 Homer St., Vancouver B.C., Canada V6B 2W9) 242 pages. Soft $16.95.
BLOOD SISTER, I AM TO THESE FIELDS. By Linda Hussa (Black Rock Press, 2001. University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada www.library.unr.edu/blackrock) 140 pages. Soft $14.
WOLFTRACKS ON THE WELCOME MAT. By Paul Zarzyski, 2004. (Carmel Publishing Co., P.O. Box 126, Cedarville, CA 96104 bmarsh@frontiernet.net) 135 pages. Hardbound $20.
GRASS. By Buck Ramsey, edited by Scott Baucher and Bette Ramsey, 2005. (Texas Tech University Press, Box 41037, Lubbock, TX 79409-1037) Hardbound plus CD $35.
LIKE FISH IN THE FREEZER. Edited by Jon Broderick, 2004.(Cannon Beach Arts Association, Cannon Beach, OR. 38 pages. $12.
Please read the terms of the Creative Commons License for this site. Unless specified otherwise, all photographs herein are attributed to and copyrighted by Robbin Dofflemyer, all prose and poetry attributed to and copyrighted by John C. Dofflemyer.
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June 18, 2005
Dawn low in the south
almost gold on the dry,
east slabs stacked upcanyon,
still too early
to pray for rain.
Barns half-gone,
one hundred fifty tons
of hundred sixty-five dollar hay
in three months
bucked to the truck
and spread to the hills
like offerings
to hungry gods.
The cows wait now
for the diesel�s purr
with growthy calves
that pull them down
ten days before
we put the bulls out.
Long, crisp shadows of sycamores
reach across the dusty horse lot,
I put my finger on the point of Sulphur Peak
despite the forecasts on every local channel
promising perfection for a week �
good news
as a storm brews
somewhere close.
August 16, 2005
Too soon spent, the days
of work and contemplation.
I hear my stories rest
with how it used to be.
Yet the Buckeyes
still cling to leaves burnt dry,
each crooked twig, a ghoulish
fingernail aflame, dripping
fire or blood in streams
at their feet around
All Soul�s Eve
as month-old calves
bust and run in gusts
before a chance of rain
and new, green feed.
We begin again
to chase the weather �
feed hay, cut wood,
and wait to germinate
another string of possibilities.
Coyotes are circling around our truth.
- William Stafford (�Outside�)
Time before the calves come
to fill the canyon
with the scent
of limp placentas,
wet hides licked
to stand and suck
for the wobbly first time �
time to smell milk
on their faces.
Time to find the rifle,
oil the dust away,
locate that brutal place
and stow it
with a box of shells
in the pickup
until they�re big enough
to fend for themselves.
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