Cows Sleep This Time of Night

​

A tiny flying creature fell into my whiskey glass

when I went to take a pee.

I see what it did to that little navigator

to soak in whiskey but I know

that doesn’t apply to me

exactly. Still, it makes me wonder.

 

A lot of stuff makes me wonder

but I’m not listing all of that here.

The only thing we can ask

of each other is that we

try to understand each other

which seems to be a task

too difficult for everyone.

 

Friends, let’s try it,

before the end of the world

before my taxes go too high to pay

before my kids get too old to treat me right

before my grandkids get sick of me

before Walt Whitman comes back from the dead

before I get leukemia or Parkinson’s

before the planet burns up

before the Cubs win another series

before Vladimir Putin is elected President of the U.S.

 

I can still do the Mork from Ork

sign of peace with both hands,

that should count for something, I think.

I know all the words

to “America the Beautiful” and

the “Star-Spangled Banner”

at least the first verses.

 

Tell me all your troubles

I promise you I can lend

a sympathetic ear but I probably

won’t give you a dollar even if your

cardboard sign assures me

Jesus loves me.

 

I can see out into the darkness

where cattle and flies

work toward world domination

though they have no idea they are.

I wonder when the cattle are going

to figure out it’s all a fix.

 

I think I’ll go out on the porch.

Join the coyotes to bay at the moon.

They had the right idea all along—

live free, hang with your family,

eat what you find, stay away

from humans, die where no one

can find out where your body lies.

 

 

 Wishin’ Jupiter Ranch

 

It’s the night after the full moon,

the pasture practically ablaze.

When I come back to the chair

a fly is occupying my place.

Kindly, or maybe in deference to my size

the fly gets up and goes somewhere else.

Fall, the leaves are turning color.

People as usual are getting weirded out

about college football.

Some things you can predict

about human behavior.

Like you can predict what flies’ll do.

Other things you can’t predict—

fits of rage, for example, are hard to predict

though sometimes it’s possible to understand them

after the fact, and after thirty or forty years

of intensive psychoanalysis.

Probably little can explain constant wars,

starvation, poverty, epidemics, and prejudice.

No one can tell what makes a Nazi

into a Nazi, a Hutu hate a Tutsi.

What seems apparent is humans

are hard-wired, as they say,

to act stupidly. Unlike flies

or orangutans, which are relatively predictable.

We mostly know what a snake’ll do

before it does it, or a rabbit.

With a human you never know

which in this great experiment

is the factor—not love, nor ignorance,

nor pain, nor separation, nor loneliness,

nor deprivation, nor wealth.

Tell me again my fellows,

what is it pains you so

though the moon shines on us

and there is a very good chance

tomorrow the sun will rise again over all

the sorrow we once more create?

 

 

 

 Kehm’s Ranch, sitting on the steps (15 Haiku)

 

OK, I am not Buddha

 

But of course, I am. I sit

and watch a neighbor

bring a truckload of poison.

 

Earlier, my friend has hung

laundry out to dry.

Basho, can you hear the sound?

 

Kehm’s Ranch, sitting on the steps

 

A small flying insect lands

On the laptop screen.

Friend, where have you been so long?

 

A visit from the master

 

Housefly lands on my keyboard

Shows me I must write

v, f, r, 4, e, s, z

 

Another voice on the ranch

 

Pheasant in the alfalfa

came here from China.

Where has the distance come from?

 

One consequence of lifetime

 

Only an old man like me

Can look at a hill

And call out to it “Mother!”

 

The benefits of haiku

 

I sit weeping for lost time

then my friend brings me

A bite of roast beef to eat

 

Wires that brace power poles

 

I first learned the name “guy wire”

As a boy from dad.

I hear a meadowlark call.

 

Cloudy, fifty-two, light rain

 

Drop of water falls from eaves.

Later another.

Cattle low. Leaves turn yellow.

 

In the chlll air there is still

All of the damage.

Wind rustles the apple tree.

 

The problem writing haiku

 

The earth here today is cold

Outside. The good thing

Is earth here today is cold

 

After lunch, egg and coffee

 

Breeze still rustles cottonwoods.

Jet sound, far away.

Crickets still sing in the grass.

 

The master visits again

 

Tells me “page up” and “enter”

Then flies away true

to its own name and actions

 

The bad thing about laptops

 

You open up the black screen,

See your reflection.

You still can’t know what to write.

 

Honey bee from far away

 

I hear her buzz approach me.

She lands on the porch.

Nothing changes in the world.

 

 

 First Day at Wishin’ Jupiter Ranch

 

Left the house this morning after a breakfast of bacon and eggs and a piece of toast with my peach preserves. Walked down the driveway a bit and cut into the trees. In these trees, most giant cottonwoods and a few cedars, there are many fallen old trees. There are no “walking paths” per se, you must pick your way through and between the fallen and the living. You will come into places of light, like little chapels. The word may be “copse” but I can’t recall that for sure. This is where you can stand, and if you stay quiet, you will hear the meadowlarks calling back and forth, and you will hear the sparrows, and you will hear many birds whose names I do not know by the sounds of their voices. There is a little bit of magic in these old woods, or what may have been called magic in other times, and many may still call it magic today, but I think that it is just what is called the earth. I think maybe it is called silence, or it may be called breathing. It may be called listening and keeping your mind quiet long enough that the air that you are breathing can talk to you in its many voices. It may be that this is all the magic, it may be all the magic that there is, or that we need. One thing I do know is that the shadows I saw move swiftly by in the end of my vision at the crest of the little hill at the edge of the trees were the magic of another major mammal species, one of the few left around in this part of the country that we have not driven into extinction, or domesticated. All I could see of those white-tail deer were the shadows so I knew they were there.

 

This tree lot shelters this old house, shelters deer and birds, and is a place humans can come to and see how much we have lost and how much we have left to save. I know there are still stars out past this magic we call earth that have magic of their own. I recognize what people have done to try to make this place better and what we have done to make it worse, mostly by accident. By accident until we see what it is that we have done. When continue to do it, accident becomes intention.

 

There is a herd of Black Angus cattle in the pasture. I step into their world by crossing over screaking barbed wire, and they immediately are alert. One hundred or more eyes all on me. Calves spook and run towards the cows. There is a low murmur of their voices as the alarm spreads through the herd, and before I walk 20 steps I can hear them calling to each other over the tops of the hills that there is danger. Still, I can see I am inadvertently herding them though my only intention is to walk along this fence row and to connect with the grass and the trees and the air as much as a modern human being can connect. I can see how the older cattle have kept their fear but have lost their other instinct that the calves still carry—to run from this upright beast. Still, my forebears learned long ago with our “big brains” as Kurt Vonnegut called them, to reach out across space in the flick of an instant, and to make any hope of salvation a distant reality. The instinct of cattle to bunch together for safety is as poor an adaptation to be around the master mammal as the instinct a cottontail rabbit has, to freeze when it sees movement. Nothing, no animal, nothing on earth stands a chance against a human, not to mention several billion of us. Hundreds of thousands of years ago we learned that we can kill anything if we put our minds to it, even a mammoth, even a whale, even entire species of birds.

 

I head across an alfalfa field to the east of the house, toward a row of round bales by Buffalo Creek. At Buffalo Creek, near where the bales are stored, the water is only a small trickle and I can cross. Before I do, I sit on a tree fallen by a beaver to try to get a photograph of the whitetails that I have seen on the other side of the creek. I think that these are probably the same shadows that moved past me like ghosts when I was in the tree grove and I couldn’t actually see them. I think that what they had done was to loop south of me, keeping plenty of distance and cover between themselves and me. I can hear them on the other side of the creek, behind some trees, snorting. I don’t know why they snort, but my guess is they caught a scent of human and know they’ve got to get away from this threat. My guess is they are snorting to get a new shot of air to assess, to clear their noses of the smell of the animal they fear. I have never hunted deer but I know from when I was a kid reading in Field & Stream and Argosy magazines articles about hunting them, it is possible, if the human keeps downwind, to almost walk up on them. The human must keep stock still when the deer have their heads up, but when they put their heads down for about three or four seconds to graze, the human can run towards the deer because they do not keep more than one sentinel. When the sentinel looks up, the human must freeze in place, because the deer will not recognize our shape, but they will see our movement. When I was a child, I read that humans have learned enough about these beasts I am stalking that some of us are able to get to within 10 feet of them undetected. From that distance it is fairly easy, I would suspect, to place the razor-tipped arrow deep into the heart of a buck, or a doe. All I want is a photo, and I, fresh from my easy life in the city where I get my meat by reaching into a cold case in a supermarket, am a poor stalker. I doubt my life will ever depend upon my ability to stalk a deer, but I know I would not have to stalk a deer if I owned a high-powered rifle. I would only have to stay downwind and get as close as I did today to one doe, to shoot her picture. She could not see nor smell me when I froze, though she stood five or six seconds looking for movement. Even an inept modern man such as I could reach across that great distance to her and change our lives forever.

 

I walked across a pasture where the cattle had grazed but they have been moved to another pasture, so I will not scare any other major beasts on my morning’s trek. Before me a half-mile is a lone tree with what appears from the distance to be a large limestone between us, but as I near the tree I see that what I thought to be a stone is a “downer cow” a seven- or eight-hundred-pound animal that must have succumbed to the attack of a microscopic animal or virus. The great chain of its vertebrae supports a cathedral of bone, a commemorative archway to one animal’s life. Two of its massive leg bones lie slightly to the north of it, probably pulled there by coyotes. Flies and thousands of little bugs, scavenger bugs and dung beetles, centipedes and roaches, molds and fungi, have done their jobs. All flesh is gone from this huge beast except for some of its hide, covered with black and white hair.

 

This is what I wish could happen to me when I die, but I know it can’t. We have laws and taboos to prevent this visible kind of magic, so we hide our valuable storehouses of energy the rest of the earth could use, to keep the curtains pulled around our own magic. Whatever our magic might be, this cow bone monument says maybe at least some of it might not be true, but we can always continue to believe in anything that is behind the magic veil. We can still have faith and hope that we are not like the cows we eat, while all we can really do, all we can really see, besides decay, is that we can have love. The one Cardinal Virtue I was taught that I can actually see having an effect is love, but St. Paul tells us to believe what we can’t see, because what we can’t see is real and what we can see is not.   

 

Near the crest I see a very real tree and a very real hill, pock-marked with badger holes. I walk the ridge to the west and reach the fence line at the high point of the ridge crest, where I use modern magic to take pictures of the hills, and where I have enough bars that I can text a message to my wife more than 200 miles away. We all know Crazy Horse would never allow anyone to take his picture, for he thought that it would steal his image and thereby his spirit. With these two bits of magic, and maybe the magic that allowed one man to kill 59 people in Las Vegas and injure nearly 560 others from a quarter-mile away, even I myself, Modern Ineptman, could have taken this land away from the people who lived here 200 years ago. 

 

On the way back to the house I pass along Buffalo Creek, then through a field of alfalfa. Crossing the alfalfa I scare up hundreds of Monarch butterflies that spook away from me, who wanders godlike amongst them, able to bring destruction or to grant life to whatever I please; to heal the damage I and my fellows have repeatedly done to the earth and each other, or not.

 

In the tree strip by the house the doe that hid there all this time sees me and runs for her life, her white tail a sign of neither surrender nor deliverance.