He has received three book awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and has published more than 1,700 poems in journals including The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, First Things, The Georgia Review, JAMA, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review and The Southern Review. In months of harsh sun like a hammer, our ranch parches like Kalahari summers after Eden. Hippos snort and waddle off through dust. Elephants with babies starved for water and slopping in rotting clay remember a river miles away and turn there for salvation.
Frog ponds swallow the sun like salt, and prawns turn back to clods.
Geese sip the last brown sap and flap, flap to rise. The wart hog flounders, the least beast of creation, halffinished, formed of the mud of the fields. In pitch between corpses of monkeys and snakes, the flesh of halfeaten gazelles, frogs hold their breath, wedging their skulls deep, deep into holes until it rains. Here, the lung fish wallows and thrashes, gills down, thick lips like a bass gulping air, in the shallow molasses of mud. Bubbles rise up from the breath hole.