Advice to 30/ 30 Poets

Keep an open knife on your desk,
look at the blade once an hour.
I could stab someone, or myself,
or someone could stab me.
A reminder of the end, the knife
is a cliché for your mortality,
you’re stuck on the point of the blade.
Time is running out, do you feel it?

Eat ice cream, break a glass.
We’re polite to one another
because we know how bad it really is.
Wear feathers and hats.

If your well runneth dry and it‘s written down, it‘s gone.
Formalization in a digital format is lame.

Write on paper and let it pile up around you
like loving arms or a voice in your ear,
drop-shoulder calm. Live your poetic
morality dream in a tactile sense.
When it’s written down it’s gone.

At the end, place your 30 days in a plastic bag
and bury them until they‘re gone. After that,
once in while, not every day, write a poem
in the sand with a stick.
Take a photo of your sand poem.

Tell your poet friends if they want help
to give me a call, my whole life is a poem.
I go into the gas station talking poetry.
That's how I pay for my gas.


This final 30/ 30 poem is dedicated to Nick, my poetry coach.

                          At the Palomino Valley, Nevada Wild Horse Detention Center

                                          I see aimless calm, scorn, submission.
                                          Home means Nevada.
                                          A constant mid-afternoon with no shade.
                                          Home means the hills.
                                          They walk in circles. Stop, go, big, small.
                                          Home means the sage and the pine.
                                          Sullen strangers in a crowd.
                                          Out by the Truckee’s silvery rills.
                                          The fence keeps them so close to one another.
                                          Out where the sun always shines.
                                          Neither tame nor wild in their sightless trance.
                                          Here is the land I love the best.
                                          Some of them die apart, but that is normal.
                                          Fairer than all I can see.
                                          Deep in the heart of the golden West.
                                          Home means Nevada to me. *


                                                   * Home Means Nevada is the official Nevada state song.

Excerpt from “Cold Book, Hot Book”

Sky shine on the wire.
My fingers outweigh my head.
The sun is a vestige in reverse.
The ancient Chinese welcomed the fantastical into their everyday lives. 
With a root wood fly whisk.

Flax in my hand is counter to cognition, as rest before color. 

* * *

Vagrant in this squint. I am hatless.
An old water course never loses its way.
He was seven years old when he started work on the ranch.
He fed the cows and horses. His calluses grew up with him.

Inner is outer overnight.

* * *

The ditch is crying.
Tawny dogs chased a old lion up a tree
The dead ewe and the dead lamb and the dead dog
are untangled by confusion.
Re-engineering the eyes in obsessive.
What of the spring, the promise of the park procession
through the colonnade.
The trapper shot the lion. 
The full cemetery under dirt, the full hearts, plastic flowers.
The seed of sleep in the baby’s eye, lettuce underground.

There is strength in denial, a sort of comfort, I guess.

Fortune Teller Farrier                                                               

Trimming hooves
at the long shadow time.

Don't pull back, put your
chestnut in mine.

See these deep grooves
there's work to be done.

You're not making contact my son,
more balanced from stone to stone.

Hold still, I’ll trim this flap
of dead dew, phew!

Your central groove
is tight as a screw driver is high.

Unlike the palm reader I
can smooth the edges

off your sole, turning
but touching the rasp

in a way I cannot say, how often
I should taper your white line,

your dirt line,your soft feathered edges.
Flop your hind leg over mine.

Some black beans never leave Mexico.


This poem is dedicated to Lisl, with thanks.

Bearing Witness at Bull Creek

I saw the trail, the quiet field,
the offending willow, the naive stream.
I saw my friend on the ground,
her foot wedged in the stirrup iron.
She held one rein,
the horse whirled and flicked
a lash end around her.

a distance of story grew between us

Buttonweed

You don’t know how you help me.
They say you came here in the wheels of a cattle truck.
Your establishment below our precious crowd,
beyond the generations who say it’s always on Sunday,
is power-driven. Conscious and unconscious join
in declaration, like in the movies when the dancers
are swirling around you and with each turn
you root yourself deeper in the clay.
And in winter, when you disappear,
you have the nerve to hide a little green.

Paraphrase

When laughing coyotes come.
How many don’t know.
When killing is that sound
at the dark end of the field.
A foal, no a fawn, a favorite.
When a doe collapses.
When the blue sky lays flat as feet. 
When stillness scorns storm’s season.
How little death(s) blank the headstone torches.

This is Your Number 8 Year

For Jeffrey Levine

A raven on a windmill palace is studying us. We’re ahorseback on an alkali two-track heading west. Today is his birthday. He’s quipping to the spacious sky, deeper and more musical than the typical flaneur. Our horses are impressed with his caw cawfony and look up. Just then the air element, which is subtle but important takes on a changing quality, a sociable curiosity rides the incoming breeze. Stronger now, it pushes outright for knowledge or justice. The windmill motor sighs, then ooom’s sending unwanted distance and lack of emotion up the shaft. Mercury dominates Gemini and the windmill blades slowly, slowly, start to turn in rationality, adapting themselves to commune with our horses who look up in wonder at this semi-flying object above their heads. The raven has a sense of humor and haw caw’s down at us. He wants to keep us at a distance. He’s earned literate friends like Priscilla Presley, who respect his perfectionism. He’s a legendary raven among ravens and can imitate Bob Dylan, Patti Labelle or a cardinal in a waxing semi-square. Our horses consider bolting, but the raven’s broader perspective about windmill blades keeps them from getting lost in the details of the creaking and groaning metal. As we ride by, the raven plumps up his nest knowing the benefit of being sensible. 

Happy Birthday Jeffrey!

Lavender

Go ahead, take a look:
in back, beyond the cat mint family
is a meme, bluish, washed. 
A distant relative you didn’t know you had.
Your great aunt maybe.
Her sachet made your throat tight.
Or in the morning deep in the east field
when your eyes got wet and uncomfortable.
What you’re saying behind my back,
that I don’t belong here, like meters or organics
is not plain spoken. The day breaks slowly,
my nostalgia is valid too.
Remember how I disappeared in winter
and now I’m back?
Did you mistake me for a weed?
At first I couldn’t tell the difference either.
Say you saw me somewhere but you can’t recall for sure.
A picture in a book or maybe a purple sage.
No one will notice, or if they do they won’t understand
your purpose. Visit me in the early light, before the work begins
and lay the scent of egypt, italy, and provence against your skin.

Blind Calm

I bring in the horse.
He reads the grass to me
silently mouthing the words.
His withers imagine the sun.
Not the delicate balance
of matins. The puzzle
between, or the sixth
of the seventh hour.
We can’t see the barn,
the house gathers quiet grass.

Spell Check Penelope or the Oleputian Muse Never Sleeps

Monk’s sandals in a daisy chain
flow like cream, nag me, nag me,
write yes, sleep no. Late night words
clog my pen like the pine needles
my neighbor stuffs in the weir.

A poem stings my hand. Spell check
Penelope lopes ole, ole, here and there
on the note pad. Glasses on,
glasses off, words roll behind my eyes
smooth as the stones we throw
in the ditch where the water
spills over the edge.

Oh, alright, two pillows,
two pills, 21 days into 30,
I’ll write you;
broccoli stalk, frozen bears,
oranges, oranges, toupee, swamp tree.

Ashes Baked Inside

The back-left flame on the old stove
ignites itself and burns all day.
After it dies it describes
the plum’s black branches,
chewed-on soot, conversations
people had, clothes they wore.
Simon’s wife cooking on a two-burner
with a trash burner on the side, doing dishes
in the bathtub, her arms wrapped
around her like a guitar.

To a Wild Foal 

Government contractors were promised three hundred a head
for every horse removed from the range. Extreme measures
were taken to hide all activity; police hired, gates installed.
Helicopters took to the air and stampeded bands of wild horses
through the desert. Newborn foals who couldn’t keep up
were bound with rope to be picked up later, for three hundred a head.

sore June sky—
spider woven silk
dapples your slight mane

About Me Less

I call my place the Three Horse Garden. One of the horses was wild and now is dead. I found its skull near Massacre Rim a few years ago. I don’t know how it died. From dehydration, starvation, or a rancher’s gun. Not a storybook ending.

If you’ve come here expecting deer and antelope and the cloudless sky of the rural West you’ll be disappointed. Maybe even discouraged. People who’ve lived here all their lives don’t see the mountains or the sunset anymore, they’re consumed with survival. My life is taken up with them, how we live in this wild place that doesn’t care about us, no matter how much we believe we belong here.

Mittens and the Moon
 
For Geo

The boy writes a newspaper to his father.

Aesthetic Studies = Jazz Press

Sets keel to poetic breaker,

realizes the value of maniacal persistence.

Freelance = Eternally Poor

Overlooking the Pacific.

Red

Abridging the narcissus, infringing the spirea,
thirsty for the 16th day, words stick in hat brims,
hang on saddlebags and ruffle sweaty girths,
hoping to be chosen for the transcontinental.

Write me. Write me.

Not a news story minus a source,
an editorial stacked in the wood shed,
burned. Un-read photo captions
and recipes mildew behind the skis.

Who will write, who will write.

Me.

Red patches on blackbird wings, a gold line between.

Desert Denouement

One valley over black clouds call up
north wind antics, we race them
heightened, my horse knows
every rock and rattle with a
familial inflection recognizable
to no one but me.
Clouds drive themselves to
memoir using I and us to describe
their significance, or metaphysics
to fade their irrevocable finale.
I attend their conspiracy of death,
recommend the event, oblivious
to my preconception of jumpy thunder.
Even so, clouds smash the pinnacle, the cave.
It’s mostly philosophical, this lightening explosion.

The Secret to Successful Ad Sales in Rural America 

With hairdressers, it’s imperative
they understand isthmus, coax them away
from the nape of the neck. With car dealers,
be a bigger beast. Pitch the negative space
of the moon to a veterinarian. Take a walk.
Sometimes a client’s name will say itself
out of the tall grass or a blackbird.
With Indian tribes talk about the non-competition
of grasshoppers. Four o’clock is best.
In this town, people advertise only if they like you.
Once I sold a light in the window for $50,000.
 Are you discouraged? You must love them
more than they love themselves. 
If a prospect is rude tell them to go race a rainbow.
Imagine the eye lashes of your horse.
Pale against the dark. Say again and again,
I am a good person. Horses talk with their ears.
If the local hairdresser says $20 is too much
for a month of exposure to the shimmer of May say,
If you don’t have the money, I’ll give you the words.

Struck

Not clean, a kill is never clean;
hanging limbs, dangling edges
of wings of bees, thunderheads
selling door to door.

The hives say we are mothers,
we have babies in the bathtub.
They come anyway, trampling
the un-mowed grass. Some bees

leave the hive for the fracking fields,
who can blame them, the problem:
itinerants aren’t native and natives
know best forage. A reporter

writes the story, a reader wilts the stinger,
the story disappears, like one-third
of the bees, with them go nuts, berries.
Itinerant bees are the culprit say

local bee growers, home-grown bees
who never leave the farm are best, but if you
stay on the farm you’re lightening-struck
because you’ve stood in one place too long. 

Hour of the Doe


Over the fence the does come, 
    shedding in silent consent.

The evening collects
    their white procession.

The salt block hollows
    their tongues.

.

Clark Gable’s Dog                                                           

If you’re a wild horse you’re a spotted owl.
Only buckaroos should sport a silk scarf in winter.
If you’re a spotted owl it’s irrelevant how many people hate you.
At the post office the cowman who wears old-fashioned
under-slung boots sics his dog on a woman in black tights.
Is the woman in tights a spotted owl? Or a journalist.
Journalists, like spotted owls differ in gene sequence
from others of their same species. Both roost
in the ante room of speculation.

Cut down all the trees,
blame the spotted owl, graze all the grass,
blame the wild horse, read the real news,
blame the journalist who covers
the wild foal stampeded in winter—its popsicle toes.

Early Season Erasures

This poem is informed by 90 poems written by young rural poets who most likely have never been to San Francisco or a museum, who live in their own anguish and imagination, often unheard by their parents and sometimes their teachers too. I publish their  poems each April in “Early Season,” Modoc County’s student poetry publication.

Rocks and bushes gasp for air,
for the beautiful sight
they would make it rain,
dress their brains with glittery
flan and jello. They put
on eyeliner for those who do not care
in seventh grade, not repeated
or recognizable, short or giraffes
locked in their arms, beat drums
on a roller coaster, scream,
watch birds die, shots ring,
they scatter, quack, scamper,
retreat white as teeth,
not yet a personality or commodified cult,
not spongy or artificial, flimsy or light,
not historical, cultural or physical,
to an end they don’t know of spaceships
fighting clouds, buildings on
mountains, bread, butter and pancakes.
A Chinese dragon, totem pole jungle gym,
go in through the mouth, wish, wait
for the clean call, the faux friends.
They pierce pieces of living hell, terror,
agony, scream from the furnace,
disassociate shoes, weird pens, paper,
cans of soup, under the care of demons in disguise,
99 percent soup, one percent themselves,
hot, dry, blue, dead, red. 

About Me More

I published a newspaper in our county,

reporting the obvious truth to a time-warped world

on the edge of civilization.

I wrote about the postmistress on the job for 40 years,

the waitress who collected antique rhinestone

western jewelry, the saddle maker, the boot maker,

the bit maker. The man who restored carriages

and small buildings. I covered the squirrel roundup,

ground hog supper and super bull rodeo, reassuringly

the same year after year.

Some of the rocks I turned over had scorpions under them.

For three years I wrote stories about local politicians

who stole $12,000,000 from our poor county treasury.

One of the politicians called me a scum bag.

Another compared herself to the Alamo.

The grocer told me I was evil. Right or wrong,

no one wanted to be exposed. It was hands off.

I was stuck in a misfit western movie.

At the market, on the post office bench, the courthouse,

the jail, the bar where the cowboy walks out,

gets on his horse and rides down the street to buy chew.

The independent, the closed-minded, the generous

drop-outs and drop-ins. The sentimental.

The swami. The snow fall after the Christmas

pageant, the miniature stallion, the gas man

who fixed my leaky stove.

I couldn’t unlock the rusty latch in the stagnant pond.

I closed the paper down.

Now I interview the sparrow on the juniper post.

The robin egg spilling its guts in the corral.

Does lying in their box elder den. Shantung.

I photograph the black bull full moon.

I report on the difference between water running over rocks.

A head count of dandelions, ears of thistles.

Metropolis of clouds, winnowing snipes.

Calves tails when they run. Willows in their scarves.

Raspberries in Love

Dedicated to Gary Snyder

But you my darling spindly whips,

living with onions, preoccupied with clips,

talk day and night about how much

Gary loved you last August. Everyone's heard

about how he ate you off the pie plate,

with a spatula.

There’s no time now for vacuous sentimentality.

May is dried up. Celebrity canes, darklings now,

pile by the ditch. The cows are using them for toothpicks.

The wild rose loves it. So does the Great Basin sage,

in the front door. Cold’s colder, hot’s hotter.

The grosbeaks missed their mark.

Will you be happy if I dig up what’s left

of the asparagus so you have room to recuperate?

I know winter was brutal, all that drought,

poplars exploding, frozen goats. I pluck a hair

off your chin and a bell rings. The poppies higher

by a foot, the buttercup burrs up your yin yang.

You say, you say, you’ve seen it all before,

when god or mother earth decide to fix it.

Hurry dears. I’ve read a scientific study

that says run-off from the mountain snowpack

diminishes each year and that sooner, not later,

your patch will evaporate to alkali.

Winter Kills the May Pole


Balancing a frozen rose
on a May pole is the fear
of machinery. The cord one foot
behind your head, its wayward stem.
Red is heavier than white
and thorny foot to foot. 
Two is easier than one trellis.
Their centers are fragrant
antiques.
Others wonder about
eyebrows, skirts,
needles falling, the morning dance.
At night, the river flows between,
over-wintered and dark.
Merry May is tiny back and forth,
a problematic dip.

 Our Sky

Not a vessel. Or a lid.

Our sky is an invitation engraved with clouds,
raw and claustrophobic.

Our sky sheets the fields, mocks the dish rag moon,
morning star’s extreme.

Homily for Bird Land


The pastor pulls down, yin yang on the belfry rope.
300 sea gulls in an alfalfa field face east and say, aaowwh.

Avocets are envelopes opening and closing, white and black tithes
cast over the pond. After ping pong we hug.

Hummingbirds sip honey from the book.

Waxwing murmurer, rose hip rosary beads, rain drops
on the back of your neck. My wings roll away from the inquisitor.

Is It a Sin?

I step over green tourists here for the film fest.
Is it a sin to say spring cloys me?

Puny limbs, goofy green nails,
Could they pull their weight in ten below?

Their floppy smiles cancel out our hidebound winter.
Each day more arrive, poking around the barn and corral.

Asparagus

Last fall you bolted oblivion and erred. 
Your feathers and beads trampled by needles.
Where was I?

Canada overhead. Our village down by a third.
This morning you show me a sixteenth of yourself.
I haven’t been paying attention.

Did my neglect of  your heart
choke the false and bushy carrots?
The new grass congratulating itself?

Our horses bolt when the dust devil snakes their fuzzy legs.

Neighbor Yvonne said, We hope you stay and die here with the rest of us.

Ekphrastic Manifesto


30/30

A hug or half a kiss.
Two moons riding a mountain.
Padlock minus a key.
What do you have in store for me?
Almost two B’s, soft backward E’s,
or four knees
facing south of the sea.
Two creatures carrying stones.
A mirror between.