DRY CRIK Journal

A boy learned that the truth leaves tracks
when we were young explorers
on the trail to understanding this world –

and when mischief leaped to stir our senses,
we could not hide our way back
with lies, without leaving tracks behind.

We may forget them, even – hope the wind
and weather erase the proof
lurking in the dark, waiting to shake hands

and be friends again. That’s who we were,
once upon a time before
talk got so expensive, so multi-syllabic,

so close to home. We have come to believe
that we are the assonance,
and wear our simplistic slogans like Nashville

sequins and whole earth ball caps, so often
that we want to become them,
hoping to hide the truth of being human.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had no garden when I first came to this spot
behind the knoll the natives claimed, echoing
beneath horses hooves still – just wild oats

to the windowsills of the faded double-wide
I bought from a Sacramento bank and moved
along a game trail between two canyons

that only run water in a downpour. Offspring
of the two huge rattlesnakes, first night here,
still find their way back, following something

I feel too, clearing the cactus I planted then.
A coming home, shovel and pitchfork work
towards a different place to rest my eyes.

My flesh is drawn into the damp soil,
producing visions, different versions of future
fruit - sweet gloamings shared on a new stage.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No more Paul Bunyan dreams
of recreating landscapes, no ‘nod
and throw’ replays out of the box,

no horsehair hung in shiny rowels
to reprove yesterday – that fearless muse
sparks the rhymes of youth.

No hurry now, no impossible task
to subdue, to submit to, to tell the crew
each time wilder. I can see

myself farther off, out of this flesh
in your eyes, in the timbre
of each word. I flex inside

but grin, non-plused – listen like
your day was just another sunset
in this canyon – but keep it alive

with moustache rising. Then I beg
for details of terrain, of the cattle,
to picture it again.

We are so childlike,
even as old men grinning
among the young, strong hearts

so seldom sure - no guarantees,
but paying attention
to a lifetime’s run of good luck.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We’ve got rain and plenty work, stacking-up
across the creek, the garden always calling
for a visit. Nothing’s changed all that much.

Not like the days and nightmares, he left behind
when he took-off for parts unknown.
You made it easy, kept everyone away

with insistent wishes your friends ignored.
This year’s calves from your black cows
may be the best ones yet, with all this grass.

Take a look, first chance you get – I know
we say it every year, but they’ll weigh-up
like little bears. And the wildflowers, Mom…

it’s worth a visit around the equinox. The kids
are driving, flying-in to gather in the garden –
plant something special for you to find!

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I will be reading to the future, assorted
children at Lincoln School where I rode my bike
half-mile down Spruce to Palm Drive,

where the high school kids parked at night
either side of the Pogue house – dodging potholes
into town and past the hospital – all closed down.

Fifty years ago I learned to pledge Allegiance,
say the Lord’s Prayer, pick which version
to contemplate, ‘debtors’ or ‘trespassers’,

for many years after, but I kept my head bent.
Pat still remembers me as an incorrigible,
busy kid on the playground. No old, dead horse

poems, I’ve found my mother’s ‘Aesop
for Children’ and remember the Milo Winter
illustrations I searched hours in pastel detail –

the mouse gnawing the lion’s rope, the gnat
and the bull – still digesting: the smaller
the mind the greater the conceit.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Loren’s story of colored horses, the great plume
of dust rising into the sky as they descended
from Buckeye – the same high ridge and deep

drop into the flat along the Kaweah that Dad & I
kicked cattle off each June – I could see it
in his eyes from the hillside across the canyon.

Bays, sorrels and duns bumping, leaping downwards,
single file – Fred Ward’s gather for the cavalry
strung for half-a-mile. It happened then, he said,

when he wanted to be a cowboy. Gills, Salinas,
Arizona rodeos, knotted tail of a paint horse
disappearing with the crack of manzanita,

forsaking the bunch for a wild one – working best
on his own. Old and cranky, put his pocket knife
to Leroy’s throat for riding in front of him

on the Roble Lomas. You could see dying
come back to life in his brown eyes, a sudden
damp reflection riding up the creek to Ishom

atop a wagon full of carp dried upon the rocks
at Belle Point. We shared it gently, heard
voices in the same place for a long time.

                                    - for Loren Fredricks

Continue reading "FROM THE POHOT PLACE" »

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It seems spring since November with
October rain and green, few frosty nights.
Just now, birds in the bare oaks practice

promising refrains, cows upcanyon quiet
with branded calves on damp, cool grass.
Not a hint of the buzz that marks the end

and we grin to one another, listen and grin
where generations have gathered, horses
tethered and irons grown cold, grinning

beneath Sulphur with a little spot of poppies
burning gold. Weathered smiles, we show
teeth and listen to our hearts howling.

                                             - for Spencer Jensen

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tall shadow on the morning wall,
like a person waiting in the dark
when I awake without a mother,

now planted atop my father
like shoeboxes in a black closet
I’ll never open – only to drive by

            with a nod to the gods
            in case they’re listening.

Cast from the desk lamp,
she comes alive when I rise
to get more coffee, changes

shape and grins with gestures.
The one she gave Robbin
has bloomed every year

since her father died, white
faces reaching for the light
when we’d return from Elko –

after ten cold days in a stale
empty house, looking out at Sulphur
as our sweet ‘welcome home’.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Little do we know of that ground
between the lush, iridescent hills
and that beyond them, except

it’s magical. How some days it
rains with coincidence when
we’re most vulnerable and open,

so helpless within ourselves –
powerless but to ignore the obvious.
You can feel the shuffling

of spirits, of ghosts, or angels slip
ahead to make the forgotten
connections to the old world –

set up camp and start a fire. The air
sings songs, one after another until
all harmonize to make you feel

like leaving your flesh, almost
blindly reaching out to touch
and hold what you know

very little about – like young calves
running, bucking across
the uneven green because they can.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ranges of foothills fall sharply from clouds
stacked against Sierra snow, pastel ridges
washed pink and lavender under light gray rain –

I want to stop and paint them from the railroad
overpass, on the highway from Visalia – park
and stop time, freeze it all while I brush

powder to paper. Commuting for weeks,
I can read the leanings of the urgent
escaping work, racing towards something

somewhere I can’t imagine as important
as these mountains – a different meaning
in the light of every day. Wrinkled one

behind the other, I identify each dark line
as it jags into the Kaweah like the folds
of bedclothes as she sleeps, going home.

Continue reading "AS SHE SLEEPS" »

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today I remember the pieces, deep
reds and blues of my mother’s Imari
glued to Mary Hadley’s farm scenes –

a fractured clash of bright and pale
that fit somehow to make a landscape
I can abide, but better on the borders

of the garden. With each glazed shard,
we till and plant our grief, a glint of color
for tomorrow’s tomatoes and squash.

I want to plant something in her
grand twenty-gallon vase that’s only
held umbrellas on its carved oak stand

half-century in a dark and dusty corner.
I want to bring it back to life, make it
useful in a pagan coup d’état that sings

with art fading in the weather, as we
all do in time, a song that celebrates
owning nothing with this flesh.

A place she can visit for coffee
and a cigarette, make suggestions
while we work the earth.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Up the Middle Fork, high in the scent of cedars
below Alder, just past that first patch of bear clover
where young bulls catch their breath and inhale

the pungent wild steamed in mountain sunshine –
a jumping-off spot to Billy’s Cabin, where Allen Drury
left his autograph with J.G. Boswell’s, my hand

beneath them, on the wall boards, now all gone.
Burro Creek, Copper Mines or Cascades – naked names,
memories and dreams still pulse there.

Mom and I at first-crossing searching under
water colored rocks for hellgrammites, a history
of learning a river that forever flows,

and floods at times – clears the deadfall,
with changes below – cycles and circles,
the scent of cedars from the shade of an oak.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Plain as paper, one can explore
the blank sheet, the light clouds
stretching across the Great Basin –

snow upon the purple ranges,
time unchanging time. Here
the wheel was lifted by hand,

progress slow, each step digested.
In a bullet, we fly by at seventy
into hours of silent space, whole

thoughts shared between us
without words spoken – not another
near, but the old souls who left no trail,

who camped and crossed before.
No place for dreamers nor the heartless,
this plain sage-ness, not for those

afraid of coyotes, ghosts and darkness –
yet so accessible from here
as we float from Elko to Bishop, home.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

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.

Continue reading "Morning After the BLUE MOON" »

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)