Rat's Country: Imagining a perfect morning

Imagining a Perfect Morning

It’s seven in the morning on a June day and I’m riding up the canyon, listening to Thorpe Creek chuckle.  I appreciate the fresh rustle of aspen,  different from the dry warning in October.  I feel the twinkle of sun and shade in the morning light.

I’m surrounded by a bouquet of scents—horse sweat, saddle leather, sage, and wild rose—and I feel beneath me the sensual movement of this mare as she makes a quick jump over the creek and then the lurch and jerk, while climbing  the rocky trail.  Her gait smoothes out as we wind around the hillside, the sun bearing down. The saddle creaks and she moves the curbed bit around in her mouth.

I’m not thinking about anything on this ride.  Nothing.

Rat's Country: About muddle

"The one whose language is muddled cannot do it; only when the mind is clear can the language be noble."

WEn Fu, The Art of Writing


Well, it might be a cold day in hell when you begin unmuddled.  It's a process--the pond settles.  Finally you see through the turgidity and the pond becomes clear.

Rat's Country: Writer's Block Before the Invention of Pencils

"Sometimes the words come easily; sometimes he sits in silence gnawing at his brush."

Wen Fu, The Art of Writing

Notes on My Mother 1: Who's the grownup here?

A few weeks ago my ninety-something mother and I got into an argument, and she said, “You don’t like

me.  You never have liked me.  You disapprove of everything I do and I try so hard to get your approval.” 

Ouch!  That sounds like something a teenager might say to a parent.

Rat's Country: "Don't Put No Headstone on My Grave"

"Don't Put No Headstone on My Grave"

Charlie Rich

Those of us who have come lately have come to stay.  Don't ask why.  Don't believe our explanations.  We might not say it, but maybe it's to be close to the Tuscarora cemetery.  Everybody in town has friends or relatives there.    Long ago Milt told me he's going no further from his doublewide than "over there," he says giving the cemetery a nod.

Tour guides name Tuscarora a ghost town.  I say the wind blew the ghosts away long ago.  When I wander among the headstones, the wrought iron fences and weathered crosses, the new slabs of decorated concrete, I think of the named and the nameless as the same.  Gone.  

Rat's Country: Misogamy Monday

Misogamy  Monday

I’m suspicious of women

who marry impossible men,

but then,  the opposite

is  true—the hapless gent

who chooses a shrew.

Yet those cloying teams,

“He’s the man of my dreams"

Fill my throat with  nausea

thinking of that  devoted old goat

and nanny goat, too.

Poems by Other People: "Hay for the Horses"

     Hay for the Horses

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
   behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
     sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
--The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds--
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."

      Gary Snyder