Poems by Raphael, Bertolino, Tremblay, Hotchkiss, & Pesznecker

           

  

Five Poems by Dan Raphael
                  

                                                

        

Autumn Jade
           
              

 i’m where rocks trick the sea into jumping to evaporation, a 
     place where not all who enter return.
the road attempts safe expedience but always surrenders to 
     the seas wild cousins, to lord gravity,
cause we yearn for the horizon, yearn to feel the moon pushing 
     us outside of our skin
              
as the shadow of winter grows, the shaman in my bones keens 
     caution and memory,
a winter ocean is immune to, balancing the sun’s heat or absence
with a constant current of arctic based chill, a life of immoderation—
constant night or constant day–or like Chicago with intolerable 
     winters and summers
where the fortnights of spring and fall are unbuttoning revels 
     cinched back
when thermal extremes burst through the neighborhood
echoing like  compressed storms in the hallway that starts 
     in my throat and ends beneath me
                 
i could use a bulbous headed kelp strand as a voodoo doll 
     for myself,
waiting for the dot-sized nibblers who may already be inside me,
sensing my beached stasis to awaken and feast, to dig their way 
     to the Valhalla of open air,
protected from the siren influence of rain, rain that would carry us 
     to a salty airless nightmare
            
 a hundred miles inland my room gets colder when i close the curtain 
     to contain the heat
fueled by electricity made from captured rivers and eons-old sunlight 
     refined with the trees it fueled :
                     
the ½ mile away freeway rumbles as if it’s the ocean, each car 
     a wave heading one way
passing its depleted self returning the other,
having visited or delivered, having spent and eaten. .
nothing swims beneath the asphalt surface, the tide of traffic
pulled by the incandescent moon of trade,
as if each wave is going to shore to work a 6 hour shift.
       
still gravity tugs,    rain insists,   
and the 24 hour mantra of 4 wheeled wave after wave will break 
     through this false bottom
to liberate soil kept decades in isolation, like rip van winkle
quickly evolving through microchips and self-hypnosis
inexpensive technology and sales techniques
              
the moon surrenders so  the tide keeps contracting, exposing the bones
of previous technologies, unleashing the weather from its 
     gravitational bondage,
putting up the sign “commercial property–will develop to suit.”
as another 3 thousand sq ft vacation home gets between me 
     and the ocean,
takes another nibble out of the horizon
i feel like a cormorant when the slough between waves sinks me 
     into a valley of mountainous water
and in a microsecond of lost faith im not sure i will rise back to level
before the waves surround me

                   
                 
               

==

      

Poems by Marx, Petersen, and Sheffield

  

Work by Doug Marx, Paulann
Petersen, and Derek Sheffield

       

        

Four Poems by Doug Marx

    

Bracket Fungi

Step by gnomic step
I find them
barnacled to bark,
pale wattles, tumors
affirming a rumor
of organic unity–    
    
witness blaze or scar
the mouth they kiss
where death lives,  
    
all family
and no branch, each
filament a thought
splicing a web,
    
how like tired hearts
stumps crumble.
    
Don’t breathe. They eat the past,
immortal, anemic,
their spores are everywhere.       

Poems by Frumkin and Prose Poems by Goodrich

Poems by Gene Frumkin
    
         

        

The Perfection of Summer Thundershowers

            
               

Every afternoon around 4 o’clock the leaves discover a wind
behind the wind a thunderhead emerges from its hiding-place
The rain pellets the heat’s thick plate
                                                                      Afterward, an hour at most
                                         a few puddles have grown
                                         blue green gold and red
                                                    in a few rutty beds
                                                    in alleys       on the streets
                                                              in craters of grass
                The heat surrounds the puddles
     they form concentric cycles                           
                                                
          

                                                           You as a man within your shelter
watched the preparation for the rain then the rain itself
For a brief time
                             while it rained
                                                               you were happy
The world you live in had changed for the better
                                                                                        You, a critical man
                                                             had been the rain
                                            as you had been the heat

              
                             

                               The rain was perfect and you had lived perfectly
since nothing could have been preferred
                                                                              to the rain
                                           As a critical man
                                                                    at the height of the downpour

(though still a nameless well-concealed lodger)
                                                                                       a flaw
had already found a warm spot in your heart

                                                 Not that the rain would stop
                                    but that it was perfect

                           

An Anthology of Earth Poems

Welcome to this ongoing anthology of contemporary “earth poems.”  This has spun off of my own writing blog because it has a life of its own. A number of North American poets have contributed their work, and hopefully we can keep the collection growing and poems available.By the way, at the end of each poem on this home page, click on “more…” to see more poems. 

            

James Grabill
Portland, Oregon
December 10, 2007

                                                    

Kalamaras, Smith, Bly, Orr, Sheffield, and Raphael

Online Prose Poem – Robert Bly     

         

The Dead Seal

              1

          Walking north along the point, I find a dead seal. From a few feet away, he looks like a brown log. The body is on its back, dead only a few hours. I stand and look at him. There’s a quiver in the dead flesh: My God, he’s still alive. And a shock goes through me, as if a wall of my room had fallen away.
             
          His head is arched back, the small eyes closed; the whiskers sometimes rise and fall. He is dying. This is oil. Here on its back is the oil that heats our houses so efficiently. Wind blows fine sand back toward the ocean. The flipper near me lies folded over the stomach, looking like an unfinished arm, lightly glazed with sand at its edges. The other flipper lies half underneath. And the seal’s skin looks like an old over coat, scratched here and there — by sharp mussel shells maybe.
       
          I reach out and touch him. Suddenly, he rears up, turns over. He gives three cries: Awaark! Awaark! Awaark! — like the cries from Christmas toys. He lunges toward me, I am terrified and leap back, though I know there can be no teeth in that jaw. He starts flopping toward the sea. But he falls over, on his face. He does not want to go back to the sea. He looks up at the sky, and he looks like and old lady who has lost her hair. He puts his chin back down on the sand, rearranges his flippers, and waits for me to go. I go.

         
 

Witherup, McNulty, Zimmerman, and LaMorticella

Poems by William Witherup
  
    
October in Appalachia
 

The last katydid knocks its tambourine,
dancing me here into what dark dream?
A bloody cloth is wiped across the trees
and the hills are full of howling strays.
     
Coal trucks hauling tons of darkness run
from Quicksand and Hazard and Kingdom Come,
dragging huge roots on underground chains,
leaking inky water thick as caulking.
     
This rocky shoulder leans toward winter sun.
The delicate mosses pray, gripping stone,
and broken dulimers break into flame.
The stars press our bones into what black seam? 
    

                                              –Hindman, Kentucky, 1973

                          

McLagan, Sheffield, Howell, Bly, and Faulkner

  
  

Poems by Elizabeth McLagan 

   

A Feather Falls from the Wing

     of Light                            
                                    

Today, someone has left like a letter
addressed to a white forest which goes on
           
trailing its blue sleepless shadows. Snow
lips, snow eyes, snow pillows. Like ripples
                 
on an overcast ocean, belts of fog
above a blue core. What is it to lie down
                  
in sleep and lie down again into the sleep
of death? Is there a dream to usher
            
the spirit across – a white hand stretched out?
Once, I lay down in snow, flakes striking
              
the tent like sparks or hard rain, except
it was lightest powder falling all night
     
into the bowl of the lake. Was your death
such a night, warm and unmeasured?
   
A snowshoe hare passed by, ghost moons
drifted into the lungs of trees. Like needles
  
falling, like scratches on a glass plate. The light
went ashy. The ink glittered before it dried.                
                                                                                                

       (from The Bitter Oleander Volume 12 Number 2, 
       Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award Winner 2006)
                 

             

Tremblay, McCord, Cooper, Averill, and Petersen

  
Poems by Bill Tremblay
             

  
  
Iron Mountain 

                    
At timberline
beside a hanging lake
tinted the teal isotope of iron
as I look at Long’s Peak
butterflies flutter Bach trills
among tundra flowers.
Two elk bound past.
Then as I cross scree fields
granite talus bows out, tilting
my balance so askew I gag,
brain spun with light oxygen
and spider belly-down hand
and foot, spraying debris
into air below, setting off
a childhood memory—
once in the black punishment
corner of my bedroom
when I was nine I saw a Cro Magnon
sitting cross-legged at a cave mouth
in the Pyrennes, gazing down
at a river valley.  No longings,
no regrets clouded the membrane
between the sea of grass
and the green sparkle of eyes.          
  

                  

Roth, Bradley, Siverly, Oliver, and Yake

       
Two Pieces by Paul Roth  

      

Nothing at All         

(from Cadenzas by Needlelight)
    

I am
the wind’s
shadow       
    
Hollowed 
by emptiness
my remains
scattered by
so many burials
rise and fall
among rock and sky
                  
I am 
the wind’s
shadow
              
Arms around me
I unwrap
are filled with all 
that’s invisible     
    
I am 
the wind’s
shadow          
    
Caught 
by jagged reflections 
of broken 
window glass           
    
I am 
the wind’s
shadow            
    
Left behind 
by the night to be 
its dark lips
around the last words 
spoken 
by dying stars
  
I am 
the wind’s
shadow
 

Roethke and Wright

Poems — Theodore Roethke

The Far Field

I        I dream of journeys repeatedly: Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long      peninsula, The road lined with snow-laden second growth, A fine dry snow ticking the windshield, Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic, And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror, The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble      of stone, Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut, Where the car stalls, Churning in a snowdrift Until the headlights darken.         II        At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower, Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert, Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse, Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump, Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken      machinery, — One learned of the eternal; And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by      rain and ground-beetles (I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin) And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run, Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers, Blasted to death by the night watchman. I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught      in the mower, My grief was not excessive. For to come upon warblers in early May Was to forget time and death: How they filled the oriole’s elm, a twittering restless      cloud, all one morning, And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from      the bird shapes, — Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, — Moving, elusive as fish, fearless, Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end      branches, Still for a moment, Then pitching away in half-flight, Lighter than finches, While the wrens bickered and sang in the      half-green hedgerows, And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in      the chicken-yard.—     Or to lie naked in sand, In the silted shallows of a slow river, Fingering a shell, Thinking: Once I was something like this, mindless, Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar; Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire; Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log, Believing: I’ll return again, As a snake or a raucous bird, Or, with luck, as a lion. I learned not to fear infinity, The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow, The wheel turning away from itself, The sprawl of the wave, The on-coming water.           III     The river turns on itself, The tree retreats into its own shadow. I feel a weightless change, a moving forward As of water quickening before a narrowing channel When banks converge, and the wide river whitens; Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, — At first a swift rippling between rocks, Then a long running over flat stones Before descending to the alluvial plane, To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from      the elmtrees. The slightly trembling water Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays; And the crabs bask near the edge, The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and      bloodsuckers, — I have come to a still, but not a deep center, A point outside the glittering current; My eyes stare at the bottom of a river, At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains, My mind moves in more than one place, In a country half-land, half-water.      I am renewed by death, thought of my death, The dry scent of a dying garden in September, The wind fanning the ash of a low fire. What I love is near at hand, Always, in earth and air.        IV    The lost self changes, Turning toward the sea, A sea-shape turning around, — An old man with his feet before the fire, In robes of green, in garments of adieu. A man faced with his own immensity Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire. The murmur of the absolute, the why Of being born falls on his naked ears. His spirit moves like monumental wind That gentles on a sunny blue plateau. He is the end of things, the final man.    All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shade Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines; Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope, A scent beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree : The pure serene of memory in one man, — A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world.