August 2024
Bio Note: From age eight thru twelve, I grew up in a small rural town of two hundred people and a few thousand dairy cows, a few thousand cattle, and a few hundred sheep, corn and soybean fields and woods as far as I could see. In summer, my mother called my brother, one-year older, and I, screen door boys, because we constantly were in and out, and if she hadn't heard the screen door slam, she knew we were off playing in the corn or at a neighboring creek. Some days she worried, some days the silence was a relief.
August Dog Days
Two buzz-cut boys
tracking down the diviner
hunched with dowsing stick,
witching rod, his eyes dry cracked cups
with dark flared saucers
curled beneath them:
we found the stallion
Cold Rolled Steel
that galloped hard tail teased out
until darkness devoured him like a drop
and we were left to ravage the tin of the earth
for the scent of his iron shoes
and the molten fragrance of mane;
and watched as darkness swept the valley
from the third-story perch,
a yellow lamp behind us
and a fan blowing cool air
into the staggering wall of heat;
and down in the brown-brown hills
and cedars the stocky black bull
standing stone-still in a torrential rain
so thick and cold it seemed
to gel on his back,
the place where steam rose,
he in no need of lightning,
for he was thunder.
Originally published in Foliate Oak
That Summer
turned by the highway north from San Luis Obispo toward the oil rigs of San Miguel and the onion fields north of Soledad, torching Santa Ana winds at our back, then west toward Castroville where the butter- yellow sunset turned to violent red altered by dust from a tractor discing in twilight on a dry field, somewhere between the jetty and Little Baja, surrounded by cement fountains and gargoyles, garish mosaic tiles, succulents and cacti, somewhere between the shifting of feet on hot ground like a lizard on asphalt, when the fog that had evaporated began to return like the smoke from a fire we thought we’d put out, road-weary, in the darkness, hungry, cooled, we continued to drive
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