Every year, an old friend visits,
Knocking on the morning door,
Before the chickens go out.
Just for a day,
Maybe two.
.
The old rivers of light and heat,
Much alive, cry
In their thirst for night,
With the promises of fading evenings liquored
In the scent of blackberries and stale grass
Hiding in the hot afternoon.
.
This crooked summer:
Like wilting vines on a broken arbor,
Motionless, as they cling fast
To the memories of serpentine edens.
I barely remember seeing the night,
Like an old, dry Autumn
Not going away.
Help me turn this knob,
Sliding back,
To the waiting moon,
Eating at sunset’s table.
.
Let us turn this season,
Facing the wind:
Fading,
Faltering,
Disappeared.
.
Now come help us mend this place,
Spilling our anxious tears as one,
To gently warm this evening.
Call early, to the stillness.
Follow all the shadows soon missed
Only to consume us.
.
Colored in leaf,
Painted in agony,
Watered in respite.
.
If I could escape time,
I’d choose not,
Rather to wallow
In sores
And dirt,
Gone dry and waiting.
Outstretched into a warm, fetching wind that will define this winter.
Your arms,
Frustration and reaching,
One more time.
Your arms,
Grasping my lumbering, cold body
Shaking,
Pulled from a creek,
Thundering in flood.
.
Your arms,
Will soon hold me, bedridden and tired of the years,
Finally.
Your arms,
In April, as the sun’s hope returned
And I slipped easily into the familiar light,
Cast across us both in one last embrace.
There, at the far end of the long, ramshackle yard,
Where grandpa’s garden starts,
And the apricot tree:
Pilfered Mockingbird delights,
For us, the watch from a circle of chairs
Some Sunday afternoon.
.
But that was before the rain,
And the wind, and shuttered windows,
Only to peek, to scratch its belly,
We knew when to stay in
And dash out,
Before the water came
Or in between.
.
Then we were graced with the long showery spring,
Great stories I was since told, in thunder and sun,
While I huddled in fear of night and flashing sounds,
In the time of peas,
And chicken manured spring gardens.
.
The San Joaquin would run high that spring
Into the summer
When the first zucchini bloomed,
And we rinsed the last of the mud from our socks.
Like it always was,
Back there, where the water still was.
All these days start with hope,
Optimism,
And some serpentine skepticism
That stays put
While the water lies flat and glassy.
.
This valley fog,
Soured and pressing,
will harken feelings of home,
Summoning some seasonal, familial promise.
.
This is a cold morning:
River hosting winter,
Almost a thing of the past,
On the shortest day of the year,
Defining the deepest place of then,
Like the hottest sequestered August afternoon:
When, as kids,
We were shut in,
And left wanting for a calling evening breeze
Never to come.
Or, now, just a brief parting sky:
A blue never seen.
.
This is the Great Valley: Tethered in the cliche
Of fog
And heat.
.
In both:
Rain is forgotten,
In the wretched gossip,
That orchards will tell.
.
But here,
When the gentle boils of this big river
Still breathe steady,
The scope of years, lives and old people:
No matter how unreal,
Or long,
Turns, now, slowly into view.
They lived this,
And danced to the sound.
.
Hunker down, into this patient water,
Fish, sands and winter bugs still crawl.
Feel this breeze:
What should be gentle and pleasant,
Is biting,
Up along the fetch of a journey,
That is not ours,
But must be.
This chill is almost enough,
We should turn away.
.
Ultimately, though, this grey sky grabs me
Takes me,
Stretches me,
Into the fading call,
Of a day that just got started.
.
Postnote: this could be the San Joaquin, the Merced, the Tuolomne, the Mokelumne, the Feather, the Sacramento, or a whole host of small streams that drain the west slope of the Sierra Nevada. All these rivers regain their magic during magnificent California winters and were once home to people that lived in a truly splendid place now fading into a soon-to-be-forgotten glorious past.
Home is where the water runs from the hills.
Gosh,
How the hydrology seeps back out of our bones,
Pouring across landscapes gone silent,
And waiting.
.
This is the way way it used to be,
Like some song playing in the corner juke,
When bars crowded early
And left well before closing.
.
This storm won’t give you resolution
Not yet,
Years will go by
Until the sun sets on a foggy bottom land
In the stalest of latest possible summers
When water is again a pastime,
As the next wind blows:
Turning heads, and raising the mutterings
Of those who still live out there.
Like old days come to visit again,
Now the dampness will live here,
For a good long while, Defining
Hopefully
This place and this time.
Soon, the waves of hungry cold
Will take the leaves,
Peaches, pears, finally the apples.
Always the last apple.
.
Released, now
To a brief ease of playing in a fickle sun
Soon covered by the gauze of quick rains.
Rains that sneak through,
Leaving grand dripping choirs
And the late night sounds of wet soil.
.
The day opens to waters passing,
And the joy of new light.
The graveyards of climate:
Like fishing,
where a scant few days are easy.
.
But mostly,
August’s forced languor
to some other eden,
Far from this nihlitude of sapped topographies,
Calls us down.
Now: the dusty dry interludes of impossible
Hell hole hermitages of heat.
Oh, Hell yeah!
.
And those cruel, cheating soft years.
.
Neah, the feint tries of Autumn:
Failed shadows of yesterday’s
Arguments over long drives
Through once watery green valleys
Where tiny creeks had life:
In those old memories we write about now,
And dream of,
Before the tiny earthquakes stir us,
From the empty, dark hour before dawn.
.
All this:
Left behind now.
.
If I could wish on a genie,
Just for this time:
Give me the geologies of water,
Grandma’s fountain,
once again.
March, April, May
Those hideous months of spring
And dying.
Times to drink to oblivion
Or get sober
Because things have gotten that bad.
More than once.
.
Summer is just a known
Constant staleness, defying perpetuity.
And time of asking calendars
About the rules of a waiting game,
Measured in drought,
Day length,
And sometimes tomatoes.
.
Give me those 4 days in October,
September, November.
Doesn’t matter:
It’s when the counting ceases,
And the shadows come to stay.
Shaken Rain 