DRY CRIK Journal

One more wet than we had calves,
she came back through three fences –
two miles to an empty pasture
to bawl across the road to dry
mates as her bag grew tighter.

Only the horned Hereford heifer
replied – deep red, slick-haired,
limp little teats flushed pink
pacing the barbed wire – until
she grazed the memory away.

Camped under the Valley Oak,
we’ll never know her thoughts,
instincts raging – when or where
she lost her calf. No buzzards,
coyotes or hogs feeding the tall grass.

Always a mystery lurking
in the canyons, the disjointed
details that beg for help,
for a cow psychologist and
real detective to explain it away.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Woven with a fallen
branch and seasons
of the ungrazed, a
hay rake rests
among the trees,
not awakened
in my lifetime.

Perhaps Len Bequette
cussed it
when he unhitched it
the last time
the creek ran enough
to irrigate hay,
when the day came

it didn’t pay –
or on the edge of open
saved for hard and hungry
times, ‘just in case’
like old farmers do –
rusty monuments,
little clues.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Almost how we planned it, a slow
gather of first-calf heifers, both sides
of the creek, running muddy, to sort
and drive with calves to be worked,
weaned and shipped to Idaho –

old-people slow, no cowboy heroics
belly-high at the crossing, horses:
skin-tight fresh, muscles pulsing,
hearts drumming out of their flesh,
everything alive and electric

after two-day’s rain on tall green
under spent remnants of mottled gray –
handfuls. Young cows plod easy
on the edge of our future, grazing
places we’ll never go.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Secret cubbyholes for lush dreams,
hirsute hillsides flowered green, wild
oats combed in waves of heavy heads

bent unanimously. Sometimes
we forget where we’ve hidden
what no man needs to steal, what

becomes of our small contribution
to ourselves. Sometimes the rhetoric
clouds where we’ve come from.

I imagine dirty cave children
rolling log, twig and bone wheels
across a hard cavern floor, new

toy traps for the unaware, hiding
the smoothest like pretty marbles
for more important revelations.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A fine sprinkling settles the canyon.
Dark ships anchor at daylight, yet
drift east to west, slipped-in from over
the Sierras, from Nevada – without sound.

No pickups rush the road, no horses
paw their mangers, no cows bawl, not
even the puppy asks out of her pen –
our gray song waits on a rainy day.

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

Pocket of Purple Chinese Houses

Milk Thistle & Honeybee

Stockwater ponds full.

Dry Creek, Wagyu calves, two cows & a stray

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The raven gets away
with damn-near everything –
black coat shining.

The hawk lifts off
with a snake, wriggling
to land sixty feet below.

We blame the bobcat
for a house cat’s screams
fading into the darkness.

Coyotes circle the house,
want to invite the unaware
to dinner.

Wild West templates
not far off, my slick bull calf
bawling at the sale yard.

                         - for Awbrey Riddle

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fog forming along the creek, we've collected another nine-tenths this morning to bring our season total close to twenty inches of rain this season. Mighty nice!

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gusty last evening, it rained steady until midnight. Showers & T-storms possible today.

What a year!! Grass belly-high, prices sky-high. My Dad said you only get a year like this once in a lifetime. So after a great grass season when cattle prices nearly doubled in 1978, after the disastrous 1976-’77 drought, he got out of the cattle business noting that he’d had two. His first was in 1951.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Beneath the naked oak with swollen bud
about to burst on twigs, I scan the stack
of limb wood stretched from trunk to granite

boulder set before my time, before cows
agreed on shady cud dreams, as I look for
trahundun – spy for Tihpiknit, keeper of

the Yokut underworld – my eyes prying
between each stick ahead of my grandson’s
hand and step as we chat around the fire pit,

gray ash cold. They find their names
etched in the concrete poured to seal
the dark abyss at the base of the rock.

A myth to share with my adult children –
rattlesnake dances and feathered baskets,
old Trudum whistling outside the den.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The young toughs and pretty boys
with ducktails greased, loose coils
trained to hang like they just escaped
a well-combed mold of cool – loud
Buicks, Olds and Chevys, GM tanks
with new paint and chrome hubcaps
loitering summer evenings, idling
at the drive-ins, revving to go fast
as Paul Anka ached on the radio.
Warm beer in a paper sack in back,
under the stars down by the river,
willows whispering in our dreams
after weeks of hundred-degree days
in someone’s orchard, on someone’s
farm or ranch for a dollar an hour,
four burgers or five gallons of gas –
armies of us wanting more to do
in every little Valley town
from Bakersfield to Modesto,
a generation of young bulls pacing
the barbed wire everywhere to lurid
rock ‘n roll gyrations that moved them
to FEAR – all the preaching, all the talk
before and after the pictures in Life,
sideburns and all, gone for a moment
when Elvis got his hair cut.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It’s a way to let the present tense
meet with the past, let the little irritants
sink and be absorbed by trees and grass –

these sojourns beyond dark mornings
to familiar places, waiting at first light
for metaphors I’ve not seen before.

They’re out there, the cops and robbers
at every stop light, every intersection
into their town. I try to be polite

and smile, try to like what I despise
of the games we play – find the patience
of a fisherman as I angle for my escape,

breathe deeply and drive towards
the Kaweah gorge and not let my
speedy relief draw too much attention.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)