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Collected Poetry

    (rd king dot net)
poetry and digital art

In California

  In November 


The sky was stuffed with black-gray clouds brooding
over the little valley, the cloudmass
aground on the hilltops, laboring,
raking the velour of cedars and pines
and now-empty oaks—the push of trunk and branch
      reaching,
reaching cloudward and catching, combing the mist.
It had not restarted to rain as yet, the air
exceptionally clear, lucid, bringing to my eyes
a little vision:  the little valley, the pastures
and their fences, some poplars rising
along the gravel drives, the hills,
the trees laboring up the hillsides, quotidiana.
I could not remember it looking like this
before—the cloudmass aground on the hilltops,
the pavement wet, wet, silver with light.
Towering up almost to the cloud-blanket, two,
old, black cottonwoods—still holding their vibrant,
yellow leaves—stood like sentries or ambivalent
      goddesses.
Rain had swollen the cow pastures around the ranchettes.
So verdant and ample they were, they looked like
carpet rolled-up to the porches of the country houses
      lingering
at the end of the gravel drives.  The cows had moved,
under the tree canopy where the fences butted
the hillsides.  The pastures were brazen with color,
the cottonwoods billowing overhead.  The clouds
keeping everything postured beneath and lit with a
      most
intriguing light.  The ranchettes seemed captured
in a little diorama, off, there to the right.




 
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