The Elegant Trogon of Rucker Canyon


November 4, 2007

"We come from a family of campers, we are honor bound." -Darla Whitehead, "The Divers, the Drowned and the Delivered" in The Book of Warnings

A small group of white tail deer (and a fawn!) at my window, 4:45 a.m. It is fall in Bisbee, Arizona. So now I know who ate the coleus....and I thought it was a mole. They stay up in the higher ranges in summer and come down about now to escape the colder climates up there. As for the mountain lion that likes to hang out across the street...well....who's asking. But I do watch my back and I'm sure the deer do too.

And last night, my sister gave me a house for my birthday. She enticed me with a fine lunch up at Broken Toe in Cave Creek (an old Apache hangout) in order to bless and surprise me with my own set of camping gear: tent, canopy, Coleman stove, water jugs, percolator, an entire kitchen sink (so I suppose I cannot say she gave me everything but the kitchen sink), utensils, pots and pans and most importantly, my very own Skippy.

A Skippy is a big flashlight one uses to traipse through lion and bear country at night in order to go to the bathroom.

I reminded her however that she had already given me this gift once before. On about my twelfth birthday....she gave me a back pack, a sterno stove and a set of hiking pans. She had forgotten about that and I told her how Lisa and I used to go up in the hills and assemble my little sterno grill and heat up a can of Chili prior to bedding down in her old pup tent which we'd lug up the hills behind our house in order to spend a night under the stars.

I can hardly wait to use this stuff. My very own house.

Thank you Radical Ann. Thank you very, very much. Thank you for baking my very favorite thing: Your Poppy Seed cake. No one can make a poppy seed cake like that and no one should...it's all mine. You shouldn't have but...I'm glad you did. Very. I love you too.


Thunderbird At The Gila River, Summer '05

"Advice: learn poems so that you don't have to write them." -The Book of Warnings, D. Whitehead

This pretty life is death's comma
and we are between, constructing
the darkest layer in the top soils
over which the eagle flies
with the owl, as same as the bug.

Once I stood on a reservation
for our tribes and thought.
The wild wisdoms entered
like drugs with the cackle
of gypsies and caw of old birds
into the earth's big recorder.

When suddenly! Like that!
The newest grand canyon opened
her secret vaults to receive
the sound and reek of vomit from the throat
of a drunkard who turned in
and then sped away.
Ah, the stories the rocks will tell!