FOLK COLLECTION 11: The Skaggs Foundation Cowboy Poetry Collection
29769 results found for "No Search Criteria Set"Book Title
Composer
Call #
Pages
Author
Poem Title
First Lines
Keywords
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
35
Autumn
Days shorter, alfalfa in the barn, babies waiting to be born as the full moon wanes.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
36
The Old Songs
Oh! Sweet provision of Greek goatherds for outlaws, for Dionysus and his merry tribe of nymphs and satyrs cultivating grapevines.
Songs from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
37
Black Mornings
in raven feathers wrapped, I dream I am awake and there is no other world beyond these dear, dark moments sheltered and protected by a chisel beak and wings.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
38
One Moment, Please
In these hills, a man finds space that feels familiar and friendly, and it must ask in ways where we hang empty words like ribbon just to find our way back--but we stay a moment and let our horses blow.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
39
Easter 2003
Like the prow of a ship tipped upcanyon bucking the straits of weather and grass, the Killdeer circle and cry like sea gulls and we could be fishermen mending nets.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
40
Still in the Mountain
Before we came, nothing went to waste--neither time nor words at idle parked beneath the Valley Oaks--old men and boys employed as distant silhouettes beneath great canopies.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
41
Sometimes Lucky
What of science soothes the souls that haunt the draws and ridges for a song, for the rythmic chant of wind and rain--the storm that softens their way of going through time?
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
42
Exercise In Excess
I squeeze the last drop from each lemon, chew the rind and measure love to any intensity, even to the surety of solitary silence.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
43
The Sierra's Spine
The new moon smeared with autumn clouds I allow as harbingers for a wet winter--the Sierras between us again.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
44
One April
The only sense I can perceive is that the threshold opens vast that some shall enter less naive where truth is known by never asked.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
45
On the Road
They say before a rain that tarantulas move away from the creek--or towards it before a dry spell. Either way, they seem to know the shortest course across the blacktop.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
46
Io
On the horns of an infant moon, the creek shrinks and pools between sycamores and live oaks as babies come to the first-time mothers bringing the bear tracks downcanyon on the scent of spent placentas.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
47
Old Speck
I think we know the answer despite our concern for life--for the living, despite how we parade our compassion keeping the sickly and weak alive in hells of our making.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
48
October Operetta
Outside, the big dog barks circling south across the flat in mottled light--moon at high noon and ridges afire with crescendos of quick yips and extended yodels between pauses of dark silence.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
49
Elderwood Coyote
He orchestrates the cacophonous canine choir of edgy soprano yips, alto howls and slow baritone woofs with the savvy of an anarchist at midnight.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
50
Twenty-Sixth Winter
I've wanted to squeeze despair into thin air, discharge bold charity with my Remington muzzle to her ear, blast gray suffering from this fleshless, ratty hide tight as a drum over Willow Buena's bones half-a-dozen times.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
52
Letter to a Poet Friend
All too well we know the curse of words, it's blind-flailing reach for the sound and sense we must make into a song.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
54
I Owe My Soul
Few secrets in a little town, kids brooming sidewalks after school, fat-tired Schwinns slung with bags of county history we thought was news.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
55
Bull Pen
Torsos thick as trucks rise from a huge, silted tangle fo roots, colossal limbs embrace the other's empty space, side by side, like old friends--twin Valley Oaks entwined in one thatched canoopy for centuries where eagles choose to roost above corrals.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
56
Before Leaving for Kauai
We are somewhere in the tapestry--a tame, Grandma Moses scene fenced with farm animals grazing with the thousands of wild souls working the edges of our domesticity.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
57
McClure's Grocery
We know how it was without traffic gathering pop bottles in a rusty wagon along the road in the weeds discovering clear crystal treasures a mile or more to the country store--how it was to be rich when you got there.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
59
April Bullfrogs
Bullfrogs saw logs at dawn. Rattle cattails in fractured night dreams, in tight-eyed yawns they are every snoring father come and gone, every anxious moment put to rest, discarded in tiny piles like clothes at the mossy bank.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
61
Good Friday at Battle Mountain
Between Moses and Mt. Dennison, the floods run around a steep island thrust into a channel of cobbles where granite sand meets native clay.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
63
Hazards of Flight
When I was younger, I could fly from the peak of the old barn and land in granddad's garden tilled with the vineyard disk and tractor.
Poems from Dry Creek
John Dofflemyer
FC 11 D-15
64
The Living Goddess
For my fifty-third birthday my sister, the professor, calls and we talk like the old friends we have become, moving as close the the mirrors as we dare.