Frank Taber has participated in the Sacramento Poetry Center Tuesday Night Workshop for a number of years and has won several awards from the annual Berkeley Poets Dinner. He works as a consulting civil engineer.
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Dunnigan Hills
Dunnigan Hills
We form a conspiracy,
myself and these rounded lumps
covered in dry grass
with only scattered outliers
of the great oak forests
shading dusty, radio-silent hollows.
These hills are one of the subliminal
features of the valley, mostly forgotten,
like the fenced-off buttes
somewhere to the northeast.
They fail to match our ideal
of flat ground, meandering streams.
I will personify them, give
them up to metaphor, tell lies,
make them a continent,
an adolescent pimple,
a rippled scar on torn rock,
a subdued wrinkle, the source
of earthquakes. They will arise
with infamous shaking, just
you wait and see.
The sheep in their herds
shuffle-listless, gray and matted.
They too conspire, repetitiously.
I give them brooding impatience,
a sense of injustice, hidden
agendas, subterfuge.
The green time, that season will
come again. The word echoes
around. Soon enough
rain and grass will take it up. I
will continue to mutter agreement
while the sheep re-create spring.
~ Frank Taber
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