Tag: coyote

Farm Cats

~ johnbrandall

The star that exploded was way too dim. I became nothing but gravity but then I knew my soul.

Archery season for deer opens today, halfway through September, freight rail facing a union strike. You gotta get them data together, gotta get them in the same room, negotiate with them, get them on the same page. This data, that data, get them to shake hands.

I left my flip flops somewhere out there, walking around barefoot, grounding. Shards of acorn shells hurt when stuck to my soles but when clean my feet could grip better against the rock face compared to when their were sheathed in flippers.

In a shower with unheated well water. The body adjusts but the portion against which the water feels most cold is the middle of my back, along the spine, so many switches in there, skin the most naked. Need: white paint, pink paint, Naples yellow. Such a solid state of matter, ailing hospital, corrupt politician needs no rehab. You're fine, said the doctor. Get back down to the waterfront and cast that vote.

It's nice to have a little extra light. Cattle swindle, waterfront development. Notes gone the wrong way, jobs buried in the Meadowlands. A cigarette walks into a farmhouse. The metal is loose on the barn. Your teeth are decent tweezers, and other facts you might as well know while you're still human.

Farm Cat reappears. Where time is irrelevant. She's a jumper, bounces around between worlds...


Follow this link for an amalgam of various Farm writings from 2022 and 2023...

Scrub Notes, Bird Notes: Tucson, June 2024

~ johnbrandall

I. Intro: getting there
II. Other trip expenses, so far:
III. Bird notes
IV. We did what we did when we did it
V. Firmament
VI. Scrub notes
VII. Brittlebush and the voice of a bird
VIII. A room in the desert
IX. Birdsong notes
X. It left when we rained

I. Intro: getting there

Find me at the fairgrounds, it's as good a place as any, in whichever county you may seat. Quilt-mart. Family-style catfish. Steel, brown, breaking. Stave, stave off. Hot week, water down, the sun is stronger than we think. Strong corn, striped grass, green green.

Cosign for sonic coins. This is where we got run off the road last time, remember? Walk the river, find the seam, undo the enigma. Tapes in storage, do they still speak? The smell of gold I know only from a dream. Rusted rocking horse moving oil along the line. Flat Kansas, open air. Raw emotion, sudden ocean, pay dirt mining away...



Find the full post here...

Don’t Forget the

~ johnbrandall

Don’t forget the mountains.  Nor the glow on them 
as a desert’s winter sunset unfolds in the west,
the mountains in the north latching on to all that light.  
Warm, fibrous, resinous—cactuslight.  
Altitudinous, the light of late bird activity, 
of irrigation drip lines; light that skims golf course greens, 
pools, and patios; light by which the bobcat
begins her night of scratch and claw;
light that seems to brake the turn of the Earth
before ceding to the dark once more, 
letting loose squadrons of javelina, bands of coyote, 
wily packrats, and scores of Sonoran moths and bats.  
But this is light that will return, soon enough, 
to climb the tall saguaro of morning.


The link to the poem's page is here...

Encounter with an Iberian Woodrat

~ johnbrandall

Like the jigsaw puzzle suddenly nearing completion the pile was virtually gone. I had used the tarp to drag the piled debris to a new bonfire-to-be in the pasture. After the pile down below went up so easily yesterday afternoon I figured we could easily get this pile ablaze before dark.

The locust limbs split and hauled away, the thorny vines extirpated and lofted onto the pile, the only element of debris remaining where the brush pile once sat was a collection of tree detritus: twigs, leaves, the maroon pods of the honey locust. It was a curious collection, somewhat familiar-looking. I was grabbing at this melange with gloved hands and tossing some of it on the tarp to be hauled away. Doing this I stepped into a depression, wide but shallow. I started to get an inkling that I was disturbing a nest...


The full account is available here...