Poems from the Earth

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.       
   

    
    
June
  
  
A couple of cabbage white
butterflies
(the only kind we see anymore)
flit through
tumbling the hinges of summer’s phantom shutters.      
    
They’re the last stuttered prayer
of a pair of cuffed hands
that have a snowflake’s head fakes
down pat and break
free
waving goodbye.      
    
How my heart skips
to their blown fits
and sinking starts.
    
Now they’re chasing love’s tail
wrapped in twin orbits
so kite-fight tight
stars ratify themselves
winking two-in-one—    
    
half looped on the fumes as if
wobbly
tension
could win out over
synthesis    
    
in this marriage
untangling its switchback traceries its
equilibrium whipped
to a stiff jibsail froth all
waltzes and gravitations:     
    
the immense labor it takes
to keep the white flags
of their resurrection aloft.  
   

  
  

6 August 1988 
  
  
Over morning coffee on the boulevard of errands
We talk about value, the need
For reasons, pleasure’s pain, the reasons
For not having reasons, looking out
Over the intersection, a corner tavern with its eye-openers,
A couple of white, irradiated shadowprints
Someone stencilled on the sidewalk last night.     
    
For reasons too inscrutable to trace
I’m aware on my way home
That somewhere in Kansas
A white water bird sick with trace elements
Is moving into the underbrush
To die.     
    
Afternoon, in the backyard over orange
Spice iced tea
With a lemon slice,
I watch juncos and chickadees flock
And flutter, jockeying among the sparrows
And finches for a spot at the feeder,
Spilling more than they eat.    
  
  

  
  
March 
  
   
The white swan of a late winter moon
dissolves as it rises
  
round and full
migratory      
    
sleepwalking all stretchmarks and parchment
a shiny badge of conscience floating over     
   
a pearl
so utterly withdrawn and in love with the sun     
    
it scours the sky bleach blue
starless     
    
as camellias open to its chill
their scarlet kisses—    
   
I love
the sufficiency in that     
   
sorrow
blooming without regret       
     
as if it really were all
passion and revelation     
    
forgiveness a wide-eyed flowering
toward death     
     
bled petals over a snowcrust
still eating its heart out—    
    
I can see your shadow
flicker in the attic loft with its     
   
white sheets
the heat of your shyness      
   
where my hands find resting places
that match the curvature of the earth.    
        
    

SONG OF THE EARLY, WARM WIND
   
    
I come from the land where sibling winds
meet head-on, battering themselves
into silence. Born from that stand-off,
I move toward a place where cold
has fallen and stayed, my path
as long as white can take to disappear.  
        
Along the way, my eyes devour
shade, shadow, the brightness that ice
wears as its cloak and muffler.
I like the moan of melting,
not its sharp touch. Mantled by
what’s spoken, I fall silent
to questions, listening instead
for the sough and rill of my name,
Chinook, the Snow-Eater.    
  
   
   

A SACRAMENT
   
   
Become that high priest, the bee.
Drone your way from one fragrant
temple to another, nosing
into each altar. Drink what’s divine—
and while you’re there,
let some of the sacred
cling to your limbs.
Wherever you go
leave a small trail
of its golden crumbs.   

In your wake
the world unfolds
its rapture, the fruit
of its blooming.
Rooms in your house
fill with that sweetness
your body both
makes and eats.  

(from The Grove Review, 2005
and A Bride of Narrow Escape, Cloudbank Books, 2006)
   
   

   
SIGHTSEEING
   
   
These trees are on fire, always
have been, the invention of green
simply the offspring
of modest longing, this color
a mere disguise for steady
blaze. Crane your neck—
nothing but this metaphor
will do—crane it toward
the slough where herons might be,
and you see one,
lone on a hummock of grasses
that rise from the water’s
flat pewter sheen. What other
shape hooks earth to air
in this exact way: the neck
a glyph, a flicker of fire gone
half sashaying to heaven?
These trees stacked along water’s edge,
licking themselves upward branch
by branch, are as much aflame
as this bird you sight
through heat waves buckling
air before your eyes.  

(“Sightseeing” first published in Weber Studies,
Voices and Viewpoints of the Contemporary West,     
Vol. 19, No. 2, Winter 2002)           
  
    
 
        
 

A Poem by Derek Sheffield    

Waking with Quail
               
                       
Across a drift of snow, quail lightly sprint and halt
and sprint, keeping a shifting form   
   
the way flung gravel flies.  They are an answer, an echo
following dangles of topknots.  Long ago   
     
they came to carry only their own fluted weight.
Perfect, pear-shaped circles, they do not regret  
  
the past, or the world.  When I step out
to breathe the morning and wait for coffee,   
    
their pointed arrows lead from my buried ankles,
my hair pointing everywhere.   
                  

                           
         
(originally published in Open Spaces)