January 19, 2006
Light rain from dark-to-dark yesterday, making the dirt work here at the house impossible, though we’re nearly done.
Temperatures have cooled down to near freezing which will strengthen the grass, as we wait for warmer days for it grow. Cattle are scattered all over the hills. Couldn’t ask for much more!
Dry Creek: .19
Greasy Creek: .31
Paregien: ?
Beautiful sunshine this morning. The weathermen have unanimously canceled the series of storms they predicted last week, so we ought to get some calves branded Tuesday or Wednesday as the roads dry out.
I’ve been reading some more poetry from Drum Hadley’s Voice of the Borderlands, a hardcover collection of over 350 pages [click Dry Crik Picks for more info] that in its Preamble may be reminiscent of his three earlier chapbooks [see Scott Preston’s review of Between Earth and Sky in the Lost Issue of Dry Crik Review], however the bulk of the book is like listening to all the old cowboys you might have been lucky enough to have grown-up with – far and away one of the grandest experiments in vernacular poetry to date. Hadley’s sense of rhythm and space is so congruent with cowboy discourse, it becomes great reading chuck-full of wild metaphors and solid truth.
I’ve reprinted a particular poem [page 173] that’s been sticking in my head for a few days to share and to give you the flavor:
LAW ON THE BORDERLINE
One Honest Client
“Look, people don’t come to a lawyer for justice,” says Lou Baroni.
“They come because they are getting hassled or screwed,
Or they want to hassle or screw someone else.
In the twenty-three years I have practiced law,
There has been only one honest client who has come to me.
She was a little old Mexican woman.
‘Abogado, lawyer,’ she said, ‘I have come to you
Because I have a problem. Some years ago
I borrowed eight hundred dollars from a man.
Now he wants me to pay it back.
He says he will sue me if I don’t pay him.
Will you help me fight him?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘court is very expensive.
It sounds as though the simplest and most honest thing
Would be for you to simply pay the man
The eight hundred dollars you owe him.’
‘Abogado, lawyer,’ she said, ‘I certainly didn’t have to come
All the way to your office to hear advice like that.’”