All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

One Mortar, One Pestle

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THE VOW

On the way up, I needed
words to calm myself,
on this winter day when smog
smothers the valley again, grays
the rocks half a mile away
where the creek shines like chrome.
All afternoon I explored the paths
webbing down to the creek
where pounding stones and trails
are all that remain of the tribe
that once settled on cleared,
gentle inclines. I ventured up
the steep slopes toward the top
to claim it as my own in the late
afternoon sun. For all of an afternoon
I trespassed, perhaps not meant
to look down anymore
on the grayness below that never
clears. At the edge of the cliff I lost myself
easily in the breath of trees and grasses,
above chemicals ruining mind
and body, knowing I cannot protect
these hillsides. Not long ago
the tribe was ravaged by sickness
and finished off by murder and
starvation, the air and water
and the remaining creatures no longer
belonging to the earth. I have always
kept some faith in my feet, and I hiked
past cattle that fled in absolute terror
of me or refused to budge
when I approached, all
without horns. Those animals
could have done me great harm,
but didn't. I have brought you here
to the edge of this cliff to remember
the valley as it was before the earth
was sold. I will remain
as a few magic words that fly
from this cliff over the valley
to write the language of flowers
gone forever, to bear witness
for the air and water passing
through everything living, to ease
the desolation of those who believe
that all must wisely share the earth,
and although I may not even be meant
to be the voice, my words will take you
part of the way, past the last trees
to the rocks at the top behind which
a mother is lying beside her newborn calf,
a young bull grazing, so powerful
and unconcerned you might think them
godlike and pure, untouched
for generations, the huge horns
without garlands, without blood.

__________

The ancient trail died in foxtails,
emerging on the other side
of the hill, heading down
to a stretch of Sycamore Creek

where we had never been before,
the trail snaking to a pounding stone covered
with pestles. Terrifying the cattle,
I ran straight to other pounding stones,

once again along that creek
certain that I had lived
before, gathering acorns
and grinding them in the mortars.

You said you believed, as I
stooped to pick up an acorn,
one great, peaceful breath settling
on the woodlands, my self lost

long ago and again too soon,
the cattle rooting out
the acorns, our home
nowhere and everywhere.

__________

In the foothills, by a vernal pool, I once picked up a toad
that had escaped from my childhood and squeezed it
gently so that it wouldn't squirm or pee in my hand.
The toads disappeared from town long ago. Once,

when I was a flagger, I couldn't outrun the viscous
rain dropped from a cropduster. I showered,
drank a glass of milk, but still didn't feel okay, nearly
passing out. Another man ate with the poison

still on his fingertips; he stopped breathing
for two minutes before they revived him, the boss
not wanting to pay for an ambulance. After that, I noticed
the only grasslands along an avenue that stretches

across the entire valley. A lone owl perched
on a metal fence post, and eight kingbirds flitted
from barbed wire to the grass after bugs
and flitted back, the fence enabling them adapt

to cultivated land, the other birds that once used the flyway
long gone. Years later, I stood at the entrance to a canyon
among flowers whose names I didn't know until middle age,
the self unselfing, the eternal experiencing itself

for a moment, the delicate purple eyes of fiesta flowers
open on vines hanging all over poison oak, a swallowtail
exploring the filaments of the thistle, unafraid
while I watched a foot away, the first oriole of spring

suddenly winging over my head across the river to sway
on a bare buckeye branch and then return toward me,
veering away suddenly to eye me from a nearby oak
as I swayed on the cliff. On the canyon floor,

the call of the phainopepla, a heavy drop
plopping into still water, mingled
with the long musical call
of the grosbeak. I lay by the river,

gazing upward as the clouds
flowed over, and I could believe
that I have lived in wetness with the toad,
that my vines, heavy with flowers, have blanketed

bushes and limbs, that I have clung to one leaf
for ages waiting for some animal to pass,
that I have winged, a brilliant flame, from tree
to tree, eternal and forever changing, only now

aware of a possible end without grace, and I vowed
never to rob life with its splendor
from mountain or valley
or from any human being on this earth.

Please note: We have reached the end of this journey, for now at least. In the near future, I plan to focus exclusively on my other blog: Insanity is the New Normal.

www.newnormalinsanity.blogspot.com

  All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Root Surrounded by Ithuriel's Spears

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MY NEW LIFE

My new life began on a rural avenue
that twenty years before was miles
from the edge of town, the pastureland,
vineyards and orchards slowly erased

by houses and businesses. Near
the freeway, close to the river
on the south side, secure subdivisions
now crowd together along

the bluff. For years, I had taken
the rural avenues north of the river
to witness the seasons, never aware
that the city was sprawling so far north

as I gazed at orchards in bloom
or bearing fruit or bare, in spring mustard
and purple vetch choking the roadside and the rows
of some orchards. No longer grazed, pastures blossomed

with fiddleneck and owl's clover, one, almost wild,
with harvest brodiaea, the umbels crowning blonde grass
with purple, the leaves of vineyards with brilliant auras
in slanted sunlight. On the first afternoon

of my new life, I drove the avenue homeward
and saw on Avenue 40 the first bulldozers lined up
in a place where I had sighted a yellow-headed blackbird,
not far from a post where once a roadrunner perched,

the only one I have sighted on the valley floor. Ahead
stretched acres of grasslands and the plateaus,
the base of the foothills. The county had rezoned
the land so that in twenty years a city

could grow there as far as the eye could see,
from the river all the way into the foothills.
Then, I would be living my new life
without wild flowers on land where 

song birds cannot forage, a land without roots,
a river with roots of rain but with water
that can never find an ocean.

   All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Ancient Trail

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THE ANCIENT WEB

I park near a load of rubbish
dumped by the road, and, struggling
up a hillside, follow a path not sure
it is thousands of years old, but finding

destinations, the leaves of sycamores
floating onto pounding stones
or into the stream where they are dragged
along by the current and sucked under.

By the pounding stone, a lip
of earth extends from the slope,
large enough for a bed.
A house pit? Below that,

rocks stacked on
each other--a miner's grave?
Beyond the creek, five trails
join at a hub between the river

and the creek, where a rancher
dropped blocks of salt, the questions
asked a moment before lost
in the grass, empty in the curl

of a leaf. According to mystics
the ether contains records
of every moment within eternity,
a memory of every individual

experience within the physical
plane. Somehow I know where
to find the pounding stones
and house pits and trails

along the creeks, as though some
inner sight has been granted me--
a man powerless, gauche,
and unworthy. Wildcat Mountain

looms in the distance from many points
of the ancient trails, the distance
undisturbed, no one approaching
with news of forces sent to capture me

or drive me off the land,
the mansions planned
for forty acre lots. I dig
into mortars brimming

with grass and earth, the dry
oak leaves needling my fingers,
the pounding stones deep
as icebergs, the air, smelling

of rain, still in the quiet woods.
I find a pestle and turn
the tapered end
toward the hub. This web

once kept a community
alive, yet I
am lost, searching
the valley for signs

of the city in the smog
and finding none, nothing keeping
the rancher from selling off
to some developer, the trails,

snaking between buckeyes
and oaks, etched for thousands
of years in the earth, always
vanishing in the grass.