OREGON Checker Mallow on SUMMIT CREEK

Flowers are to the background green

of meadow and forest

what a well-made poem

is to the constant chatter of sounds that surrounds us.

How striking beautiful they are,

these centers

where essences converge.

THE BROKEN PLOW—a prose poem

Walking through an abandoned high-country meadow,
I stumble upon an old broken plow. It's rusted an earthy red,
and looks like it was left right where it broke, now slowly
disappearing into the rocky soil it once turned, as if the
Earth were quietly correcting our mistakes.

A hundred years ago, I can imagine a tough-as-leather
homesteader finally giving in, feeling like his own back
were broken as he set his oxen free, and then marched
straight out of these mountains, boarding a cattle car
to Chicago and a life of rent and wage slavery.

That's the hard deal the land cuts with us all. What was
the homesteader going to plant here on this acre or two
with soil so thin and nights so cold, snowbound six months
of the year? It could never be taught to say "wheat" or "corn."

The broken plow has the look of someone who has a
story to tell, but remains silent because he doesn't think
you would listen anyway. So what grows here now are just
weeds, deadly Corn lilies and worthless Sulphur cinquefoil,
both plants I know well from the Alps, weeds that choke the
life out of the land, and that are here to stay, the price we
pay now for somebody else's cheap beef.

This is not how the West was won.

The West was never won, but simply subjugated and tied
down in a straigh tjacket of barbed-wire and made to scream
meat, meat, and more meat.

I like this old, rusty, broken plow. Its stubborn silence hits
some chord of sympathy within me. As it broke, I imagine a
torrent of swearing so loud it could be heard from here
to those breaking sod in Kansas.

I shoulder my pack and walk on, thinking to myself how
good it would be to know more about this old homesteader,
and to celebrate something of the strength of spirit of this
bygone era, as a way of, if the winds be with me, beginning
the work of bringing life back to this still so full of promise,
forgotten land.

| download THE BROKEN PLOW [ 4.5 MB ]

THE LITTLE CLAVIER
please preview 150 of 631 pages
w/ my black & white photography [opens in new window]