DRY CRIK Journal

An eagle floating, feathers glint like
burnished brass above upcanyon green,
perhaps the same who claimed the breech,

coyote at bay and she, a black and helpless
silhouette under the tree where she labored –
a pitiful strain of motherhood to be admired.

I follow my eyes like the shadow I was
behind my father, tried to match his stride,
always listening, then asking more.

A few old men still remember the boy,
breaking clods behind the tractor with little
boots, or behind the four and five year-old

steers from Mexico, right off the train
across the bridge and up the road until
belly-high in heaven. But they’re not

my eyes anymore, I cannot own
the current that flows between us –
the peace that connects all things.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

his homeland and shaky California, but we
have yet to feel the darkness. Yet to see the wolf
clear the sharp Sierras between here and Elko.

We are all apart, each undone by distance, yet
together in tonight’s sky. I trust my mother
anticipates the proper moonbeam as she

trains her wings. Driving home at dawn,
the sun leaked like spotlights upon the Yokohl,
angling through low gray openings, snow

upon the Kaweah peaking into the light rain –
the kind of glory artists have captured in oil
for centuries. One must thank someone

for the real thing. She is not religious, despite
her hands folded across her breastless chest,
shoulders quivering in unison as she sleeps.

We imagine angels adjusting and attaching
feathers, a fluttering with the rising moon
we share with her ascension from this flesh.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

                        My horse is not sure he can make it
                        to the next star. You are free.
                                    - Richard Hugo (“To Women”)

The burden the stork brought, you start it all –
a child then filled with dreams, you bore
your fears and learned with me. Black soot,

roadways inflamed with smudge pot sentries,
red helmets straight for miles into the night,
always crystalline, dark rafts above by day,

for weeks. Checking temperatures,
starting wind machines, climbing towers
towards the props on flat-head Ford V8s

roaring in his ears, he was a bear asleep
before the fire, diesel sweater, when we
awoke into the smells of his dark nights.

Dialysis, thoracentesis you refuse and send
them packing, only to ask next morning
if you heard the Doctor right, ‘another day?’

‘Day by day,’ I think he said –
all of us learning together once more
how to die, how to live each breath, at last.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

the flesh wears out, joints wear thin.
A man must learn to look ahead
and down at the same time –
slow-going for the stiff-necked.

Out here, it doesn’t matter much
where you’ve been, who you know –
no one cares. The rain gods own
this ground, you’ll soon find out -

here, no one figures getting old,
getting ahead enough to quit
what we’ve always done:
staying even with the landscape.

Out here, we choose privacy,
guard our space and distrust
all things new, slow to change
who’ve we become.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

                “I can’t hear you,”
                I yell, just so he’ll shout it again.
                           - Verlena Orr (“Sixty-Nine & Pushing On”)

Certain things we need to hear
twice to sustain a mantra
that might stick, that might

someday come true again –
sweet delusions wrapped in time
waiting to be set free.

I have let the old horse
with nothing to do for years,
lose his manners, think we exist

to serve his memory when
we were kings a horseback,
hearts to grace the ground with –

Damn, both young and something!
He gets the barn when it rains,
feels the barometric pressure

falling, sees the halter in my hand
he thinks he doesn’t need,
nosing it impatiently.

I make him stand
to remember who we are –
two old men headed for the barn.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We pray for heart attacks, Mack trucks and lightening
as our way out, trading tales of die-hard mothers
like rattlesnake stories, each triggering another –

pouring wine with whiskey rants to laugh
at the sad truth we can’t improve, can’t make easier,
can’t change, but in ourselves. Out of the rain,

my great bay horse, a bag of bones at thirty,
paws the gate in the barn for more grain – an indignant
impatience I trained for years, my mother’s hands

in mine again. It’s rained five days straight,
blew the barn down, blew a tire in a rockslide,
got a ticket parked too long at the hospital,

and we look up into the gray wanting to escape
town and traffic, find home and recuperate
with neighbors and last night’s leftovers.

                                                - for Steve & Jody

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

                           I used to remember everything that happened
                           plain as the love on her face. Now it mixes
                           and fades.
                                      - Richard Hugo (“How Meadows Trick You”)

Sweet indulgences on the unimproved ground,
the picturesque, the rough and tough, entwined with similes,
lasting metaphors invested in the same place

that has changed a little on its own along the creek.
Was it my birthday in ’68 or ’69, twenty or twenty-one in love
with someone, or not – wet feet beneath the sycamores

walking after a wet spring, huge high-channel puddles
reflecting blue and cumulus through naked limbs – I may have
even cried, and they may have held me there

forever here, until the miners felled them? Canada
was the question, as I stole photographs to take back to school
to share, to hold before I gave that future up.

That’s how it goes along braided creeks, memories
that can be shaped and improved by lots of rain, rafts of deadfall
redirecting flows, carving faces in their cobbled banks.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not the first time
the roof blew off
with half-a-stack inside –

moved it in the Fifties,
to patch and paint it half-a-century
beside the sycamore.

How many bales
bucked up and down
the years, how many mine?

How many heartbeats?
How much sweat and hay dust
in its rafters still alive on its side?

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In the shadow of the fallen
limb, waist-sized carcass
the grass is swallowing –

on the dark side there,
something beautiful, ex-
citing, you’ve never seen

quite. We part green stems
like curtains and there,
a child again playing games

by herself – preferring
clear the hell away
from her mother’s shrill

pomposity fixed
on what she is not.
And her mother, the

teetotaler that married
the old judge who hid
in the barn with his jug.

Even now, I can hear it
pierce rooms through
the big house, the faux-

operatic screeched keyless
to hello yodels at the door
in those days – so senseless

now, but she’s OK
playing princess
for as long as she can.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

                  To be shaping again, model
                  And tool, craft of culture,
                  How we go on.
                              - Gary Snyder (“Axe Handles”)

The world is waiting for our next move,
anticipating the evolution we still trust
we will survive. The ospreys are back –

looking for a place to live since burning
the power poles down with their first wet nest,
since sycamores were swapped for progress,

since the Terminus dances washed away
in the Flood of ’55 – always looking
for a good high home near all-year water.

A good sign – gone thirty winters, maybe
shot with something other than my Canon,
– same aerodynamics of a ten-inch bass

in black and white, safe with Cedric Wright’s
photographs, a gift from high school, safe
on the bookshelves of lost memories. Again

and again, we learn the hard way, the pattern…
not far off with each tool, each new technology
for a world ready to adapt with or without us.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Slow steps across distance growing
shorter, oak shade with springs leaking
out of the ground, cracks in the granite

savored now with the first breath drawn
by men, men and women, children after
children becoming part of the same

moment, a millisecond or so, back.
Their songs still linger here, echo
in the canyons, grow to the dark side

of rocks like velvet moss refreshed
by rain or grin defiantly with the lichen –
sparks of fire back towards the sun.

I don’t need to understand the words –
the song is enough – an old melody
holding ground just off the road.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bigger than advertised, currently .86" in the gauge @ daylight, weathermen extending duration from noon until this evening. We can use it all!

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Audrey Maze

Evan Anderson

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You’re not there, not among the anonymous
on the streets, not among the lean coyotes
owning the alleys, not upon the bloated

screen chasing air time – I’m glad for that,
I guess – but have we forgotten we were
the children sired and suckled on prosperity,

fast times, drugs and expensive whiskey.
I drowned out Richie Valens on my Zenith,
moaned and groaned each new emotion

to myself, imagining. Who took Otis away
from us when we were full of feeling
everything we could? But we’re not there

anymore, each retreating to safer places
in the landscapes left of our minds –
always leaving a bit of soul behind.

As always, I continue to edit or delete completely – appreciating more that our accumulated entries have begun to work for us as a functioning journal, more dependable at this juncture than cluttered memories.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

                    or

WHO NEEDS A CLIMATE CHANGE?

A man learns to fall back, ease-off when
the sudden squeak of wire sings that single
discordant note between staple and post,

the prolonged prelude to tangled visions
of cattle leaking, fence posts cracking,
barbed wire screeching, chaos waiting

to take shape before him – or the repairs
wear him down to going slow, going
thoroughly through life, discovering details.

Yes Joan, we were so sure in California –
sure as Jeffers’s Big Sur crags that it would last
despite and beyond the pressure

of our fantasies each time we tweaked
the ‘get-rich-quick’ machine. How many
can we pasture now building cities

on the farm ground? how many laws?
how tight the wire? how much whiskey
will we need to drink without water?

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Dry Creek - a.m.

Bob and I worked above the fog yesterday, getting ready to brand his calves tomorrow.

Dry Creek - p.m.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 4:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You could hear the rumble of diesels starting
downcanyon, the clack of grousers, the squeal
of steel upon the cobbles stacked in the creek

each morning moving closer to sounding normal –
you could feel the spirit die within you, leaving
upcanyon for a steeper place to rest and be

beyond the hungry grasp of mortals. But it was
the felling of old trees, the tangle of white sycamores,
thick stumps severed from their roots, green leaves

wilting, red flesh open to the road, all bleeding
in the bright Sabbath sunshine that cut the deepest.
Chain-sawed, erased - open sky clear to the creek.

To the prayers and preachers fresh from
Southern California, we became the gentiles,
the native heathens, the diggers and grinders,

the backwards shepherds dressed in dead skins
living and believing in more than we could hold
or control. I remember whispers then, waking

in the dark to rise and write, lend letters of logic
to a wilder perspective – longer term than the symbolic
suggestions from the monkey-wrenching men.

Silent at dawn, shadows shrink across the canyon,
the naked sound of ambition dressed in religion –
the quiet sound of coins on the tabernacle floor.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Started the fire at 3:15

           Western Livestock Journal
           and broken fencepost
                      split thin redwood kindling,
                      oak and manzanita –

and left upstream
           after spraying weeds all day
           with the Kawasaki Mule

                      feed on one side of the wire,
                      weeds on the other –

to check on the neighbor
just out of the hospital,
           too sore to ‘rock ‘n roll’
           New Year’s Eve.

Shared a glass of whiskey wishes
and listened to the girls talk cattle,
bulls and marbling.

You and I back home alone –
red wine around the fire, meat on
when the moon cleared the saddle
           this side of Sulphur

                      top sirloins,
                      garlic cloves
                                 oiled in tin foil
                      licked by flames

under a remnant storm sheet –
           silver cloud reflection
           aiming higher westerly,

                      big bright moon in the V

           filigreed by silk oak leaves
           dry and hanging like feathers

until the meat was done.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 3:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)