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a forgotten voice, perhaps, like old man
Steadman’s? Maybe a little left behind
after his hogs cleaned-up, rooted through

the floorboards the last time he fed them.
Gone for days, he must have kept to himself –
no one remembers his first name.

Or the old Indian hanged in an oak
up the next canyon for killing his white
sidekick who repeatedly beat him.

The odd lot when Visalia was
a long day’s ride around the swamps,
Bald Eagles dotting the tops of Valley Oaks

where the Kaweah spread and hesitated
for centuries, lost its High Sierra steam
and lingered, beckoning the brave.

we step around them, waiting
for the old horse or dog on the edge
of suffering, or the crippled cow,

before pulling the necessary trigger.
We cannot pretend we do not see
gophers in the garden, the endless trail

of ants, the rats’ nest - we deal death
as we wait for our own, always hoping
our compassion might outweigh the facts.

Killing is not for old men who have lost
their focus, who cannot pull the blinders up
to eclipse themselves. A man can endure

only so many squeezes, so many crosshairs
before he begins to step around insects
and spiders, avoiding the snakes in the road.

It is time, our true beginning of the year as we assure next year’s calves. The early morning air is filled with the bellows of bulls, testosterone ringing, hanging in the cottonwoods as we gather to put them out with the cows. The older bulls know, and the new bulls try to avoid this new intensity of posturing. Our bulls are fairly gentle and easy to handle, given time, but the air gets thick as space decreases in the corral. Some we can haul to the various pastures, but in Greasy we have to drive them to the cows. It always helps to have a bull who’s been there before, who knows the way, who knows it’s time to go to work.

We select the bulls for each bunch of cows, knowing some will change pastures, leaving a wake of broken posts and wire to repair. Let the games begin!

Clarence and Zach headed for the Top.

My name is in the book
with many others:
the pregnant girl
I held in thin air,
in the chimney

near the top – we know
she had no business there,
no reason other
than keeping-up with him.
It was important then.

We were close
for an instant
above Rae Lakes,
mules and horses
grazing between them,

gripped intensely
by the next step down.
Her name and face are lost,
but not my promise
to stay off peaks.

half-embarrassed that you have not seen her
naked, that you can’t relax, that you may be afraid
to know her, afraid to look through her eyes

if she shows herself. Each print embossed
repeatedly, you can see where she fumbled
with the latch, changed her mind and left

you to yourself, yet you can feel her
watching through the manzanita leaves
from the far hillside. There are no secrets

here. Wind and rain may work old tracks
away, but now that she has seen you,
you have become the hunted.

Few at a time, we learned words early, felt
them resonate coming and going, leaving
and landing like planes and rockets
through a sea of amniotic fluid. Some
keep listening in the dark for more, yearning
for an explanation – good Girl and Boy
Scouts busy before their transformations.

Through the jagged granite teeth at the top
of the Sierras, the wind can whine eerily,
pass through the flesh, reach for another
chord as flames dance. You begin to grin,
being small is so pleasant – and you listen
carefully, hoping to bring the song home
just to lose it coming off the mountain.

In love with the flesh, we understand
the physical, the dust and dirt decomposition,
all the micro-elements ingested by roots,
seasoned with a dash of soul dispersed
in fruits and so on… forever one – a song
too long for the movie they’re selling, even for
the gods who swim and fly like we once did.

She says it is so quiet here, so black at night –
and I remember walking beneath streetlamps,
waking to the purr of a city sleeping, distant
sirens, another song of being small, but more
helpless than insignificant in the big cage spun

– Otis Redding and the rest of us, just
waiting for our numbers to be drawn.

like an accordion greening, left on its side beneath
a new battalion of clouds pressing eastward,
blushing scarlet off the barn roof, the autumn

sycamores and this keyboard for an instant.
Quickly science fiction, I am an alien awash
in ever-changing hues of crimson, just arrived

on a cloud, glowing now like a light bulb
as the sky turns gray. ‘A sign,’ I say silently
to myself, ‘for any damn thing to happen!’

are naked and warm, nothing else –
no watch, no phone – just you,
whoever you are, just you.

You will hear voices there, even
from here, but if you dare disconnect
your lifelines and go in the flesh,

it is indeed another world
that takes you in, accommodates
your clumsiness, or not, it’s wild.

As you learn to look close-up,
old words come, old voices –
woodpeckers bickering in an oak.

Pretty soon, someone says, ‘Look
at me!’ and you remember
who you were, what you dreamed.

Sometimes it pays to look off –
nothing monetary, but like poetry,
you may not want to come back.

The earth has opened-up, deep with rain –
it breathes off trees and grass, all exhaling
a damp, azure veil between us and the world.
About the harvest, packing the last bushel or
lug box to the shed – pass the jug and grin
with familiar faces, between swallows, lucky
and humble to look up at once upon a time.

not the rainy holiday traffic stacked and smeared
red across a pickup’s windshield, not the calf
that needs doctoring, but more like the everyday

broke horse in the far corner come saddling –
I’m fine where I am. Visalia has become a city
trying to survive on services spread across

a thousand acres of farm ground planted
to houses, many empty boxes. Just off Lover’s
Lane where my mother must have parked

in high school, the Hmong’s ripe late-tomatoes
staked in tall green rows, lit like Christmas trees,
will fill a lug where the construction stopped

on sandy loam – he’s a second-class throwback
even the city fathers have to admire. I prepare
to walk the plank: need jacket, hat and glasses,

cigarettes and messy cup of coffee as I map
the long way in to see if he got his crop off –
something else, something more than business.

who let the music happen.
The sycamores want to turn
yellow, orange and brown,

let their water run backwards
into the creek, get naked and bare
gray limbs against the green,

the blue and white cumulus,
after rain. Come Thanksgiving,
each day becomes a marvel

in the making, the prolonged
undressing with eyes wide
beyond beliefs, beyond self

to find meek and humble
comforting, to be absorbed
by a landscape changing.