A Growing Collection of Earth Poems by Contemporary Poets, Part I
This is Section I of a growing collection of “earth poems” written by contemporary American poets. To contribute, please share your poems in a comment on any part of this blog or email them to jimar@spiritone.com (James Grabill). Good energy to you.
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.
Notes on Grace
Driving back east through cornfields,
cornfields under fluorescing skies
stalks with outreaching palms, receiving light,
turning it to life, what they are, how they’re formed
perfectly together, the highway
loops up ramps and suddenly towers, in rows,
brick red, marble white, with mile-long
freight trains slow rolling through stockyards,
stockyards, steam, smoke, rising, making haze.
Come with me,
if you want to go to Kansas City,
I find myself singing out the car window
to Charlie Parker’s ghost,
feeling him reach inside the fibres of song
to leap oxygen scales with night’s blue statement—
So long, pretty baby,
the time has come for me to bid adieu
and the promised poetry of the road
becomes a sky filled with neon
Put a twenty dollar gold piece on my watch-chain…
don’t cry over me, ‘cause I’m goin’ to Kansas City.
An effortless movement of alto air,
corn leaves lifting in a rain-filled breeze.
A Front Range Sky
From kitchen windows gold
sunset pastured horses drink and graze,
raising their body heat
for the coming January night.
Cottonwoods stunted by having
only the dirt road’s spillover to
nourish them lie closer to the ground
than the well-fed. The wind
that makes their branches dance
in praise of the changing light
also drives an almost slate-colored
cloud the size of Rhode Island
over the foothills, buoying a smaller
cloud’s flight, undulating its wings
like a manta ray, and beyond
like a company of steel guitars
other clouds scud west
out to pagodas of snow.
A polished aluminum sun
brightens as evening gathers
so bright time skips a beat.
(from Rainstorm over the Alphabet,
Bill Tremblay, Lynx House Press, 2001)
Work by Allan Cooper
WHITE CHRYSANTHEMUMS
I didn’t come here to meet you, but here you are, and the world is better for it. I don’t know if we’re male or female, black or white. These are questions the crickets never ponder.
For now there’s silence in the garden, so the blossoms will have to wait. I remember the black carnations nodding their heads in the wind. And the white chrysanthemums, each bloom as radiant as a human face in love.
The Cricket
There’s that cricket again. His voice
in the heat of the day seems urgent,
but at night grows more relaxed.
He knows the cold is coming,
but his song has something more
important in it. He has appointments
with the night and the day.
Issa loved crickets, and no wonder:
they were his friends, and he knew
how to let down the secret veil
between their two worlds. The crickets say
the cold is coming, and the inevitable dark.
If only we could sing until we die.
The Banquet Table of the Light
Wind sounds rise inside the pines. This is the music that draws the deer close, and the chickadee in his black cap and mask. Here there are notes full of resin and seed that make the mind fertile, and the body leap up from its seat.
The body wants the windows of the air to open, so that clouds can come near, and the winter thunder sometimes heard at a distance, as if a wall were levelled at last. It reaches out to touch the doe’s hair as she passes, and holds the chickadee as he swings up and down from his cone.
The body sits with all this, at the banquet table of the light, where it’s possible for all things to come together at last, full of laughter and watery sound, a tone that rises half in this world and half in the world that lives in the air.
Poems by Diane Averill
Creed of an Unrepentant Pagan
I believe in the resurrection of forests,
the sanctity of solitude,
and the communion of crickets and humans.
I believe in the preservation of frogs,
their skins so different
from our own outer layers,
wet, more
like the skins of vaginas.
I believe in god the brother
and in god the sister
doing her angel fish dance.
I consider the word holy and the word sexual.
I study the power of green and yellow
and the holy spirit of blue.
These are the powers of the child who died
because he drew a picture of sky
and forgot to draw the sun in.
I believe in art, not as pinnacle or pedestal
but as a way to breathe with your ribs expanding
the way branches of any winter tree lift
around their bird hearts in the wind.
I subscribe to the tease of my own ignorance,
the way it allows me to know.
I know the laughter of twelve-year-old girls on a bus
who can’t stop themselves from laughing
faster than freeway traffic despite the turning
of adult frowns in their direction.
And I believe in young men who double up laughing
so hard they become one laugh.
I believe in the one god
of wildness, in the preservation of possums
and in the divine commandments of dream dragons.
And I know the doctrine of dogwood
shadows the immortality of fireweed.
I practice release from instant religion,
from worship at the golden arches of Self.
I believe in the consciousness of all creatures
and I know that spiderwebs under my mail box
receive messages from the morning sun.
I believe in the rainclock ticking on my roof.
Clearly the eyes of my brown dream
animal were the eyes of my grandmother,
and I know a multitude
a blue-green leaves died and came back to life
in the eyes of my granddaughter.
I know and believe that the raccoon’s
watch-jeweler fingers sort through the garbage
of our civilized minds. I learn from the long trail lit
by lantern leaves in the early fall
of humanity. I believe in sin
of omission, which is a tourist turning
his back on the deer who walk the spine
of Hurricane Hill because
Deer don’t photograph well.
I believe in ethereal grasses and orgasms.
I know that time is a wave
of blackberry bushes rising
over a weathered fence wearing
flowers of summer foam—whole minutes of them.
I listen to the different dialects
of pine and cedar and believe
in burning sadness to the ground
even though it will spring back.
I know there is prayer,
a red geranium lifting its many red heads
to the firmament, and I believe in sky,
a river of flame so fluid
a child could skip stones along its back.
I know and believe in the roots of this flame,
reaching deeply into the earth,
to bring forth salal and salamander.
I receive the pulse of water
in the depths of Lake Crescent and I watch
the galaxies on its surface. I know
the little round ball of moss in the Hoh Rainforest,
peaceful as a lightly formed fist
is another kind of prayer.
Finding the Dark Time
Insubstantial now,
she lies down below fern,
leaf-shadow on a half-cloudy day.
Above, hail displaced apple blossoms,
filling the air with the scent of white melting into moss
where a newborn
dinosaur-headed sword fern
began its soft uncurl.
Under her were the roots of fir,
seeking water, going as they must have gone,
step by rooty step
in their own decade-slow way
towards the marsh for centuries.
As sun came back she recalled the bones on rocks—
was it just this morning—right above a veiny stream.
Bones of a small animal she couldn’t name
because it was no longer dressed in a face.
Naked jaw’s teeth serrated
like a sword fern. It was this which had
given her the gift of time
stopping for awhile, for long enough
to lay herself down.
(from For All That Remains, Diane
Averill, Fir Tree Press, 2007)
A Link to Poems by Dan Raphael
in the M Review
Poems by George Kalamaras
At the Ashram of Trailanga Swami
The temple priest tells you he cannot recollect
being a silk trader nine years ago in Delhi
but can recall every detail of his last incarnation
when he wandered Calcutta as a cow,
vowing never again to nuzzle trash
for cabbage leaves and lichi rinds.
A sweeper woman hunched into a stick
of incense confides with downcast eyes that she sees
God in every ringlet of smoke
but not in the curl of her daughter’s
hair or in the evening lust her husband returns
with, sweaty from river washing,
musk of some Brahmin’s shirt
still clinging to him. Does the body
bring one closer to
or further from oneself? The reaching
of a tongue into the salt of another
steady your craving or substitute
moaning for sound? Trailanga Swami
taught that OM could be heard
in every cell if one could but turn
the tongue toward the nectar
that drips from the back of the throat,
but how can one learn to move from the body
into that vowel? Into a temple
pool’s luminous flash of carp? Into liquid
flesh, perfect dissolve? You chant a secret
mantra, pour water over the massive Shiva lingam
he retrieved 130 years ago from the bottom
of Ganga, touch its centuries of sexual longing
smooth from the clutch of many hands,
firm from cremation ash spinning electrons black
in your inner ear. Why is it you sometimes hear
a buzzing, get an erection when caressing bark
of a jack fruit tree, or when writing
a poem about a leopard, rich underbelly
of ribgrass? You bow to the statue
of the one you’ve come so far to feel,
the great Trailanga. Dead for 100 years, he vibrates
still in the stone. Mounds of marigolds
flower his neck in fiery ropes, luminous
snakes unwound into higher regions
where sadhus swear a cool wind from below somehow comes
all the way to the throat as Kundalini’s hot scales
unwind in the spine. 300 pounds of saintliness,
you think, yet gravity could not hold.
All that is moving is still, the temple
priest confides, turning a cabbage leaf
in his left hand, and all that is still
continues. You see a swirling atom
in his finger. Wonder what about being a cow
had left him fixated on lichis. Consider
your own former lives—a monk, perhaps,
in a fourteenth-century English Abbey, an Athonian
Hesychast, a janitor in Alabama, a wandering sadhu,
some insect or other crucified in the curious fist
of a boy shamed by the word Georgie
or Georgette or Georgina. Recall the ant
who crossed your desk this morning, certain
its ash carried your name black as it sifted
each poem for vowels, the photograph
of a Calcutta yogi on leopard mat. Its left
antenna prodding each paw-print blotch
like a hummingbird purling fur
for sugar water. Depth of a lover’s tongue
urging spasms of salt. A leptoscope
probing black and white cells
for bright, red divine milk.
Beloved Star
Beloved star, the world could die
from so much scraping.
The chiropractic elm with its bent cradle.
Boys sensing the moon in the waists
of every young woman with a belly piercing.
So you inherited the watchful eye
of your beagle. Fly-swat
against the dark lamp
nailed one of your breaths shut
as if your lung closed some lid.
A star could clasp a tree, lust
of every galaxy sparking the bark.
Your dog showing you the only true sound,
scent of cat-track through moss.
The world could force love
out of even the saddest plant.
Great hostas smalling toward the ivy
as if inspecting a sudden fatigue
in the color green.
So you’ve inherited the desire
to tongue another’s navel? To mouth
the sound, I would never kill a single thing
into a round, into a shallow star?
How could your own have ever fed you enough?
Firmed hair and bone? Filled you with blood
drawn in caves? Sun smear
of a bee entrail in dark rock?
Inside the crushed wing
of everything you tried to love
are young hands skilled with moss.
In moist belly pods,
a most minute lamp.
Bend your head below your knee.
Smell the sage
of sunken stars, inverted fire.
Kiss this sky.
(from the online periodical Drunken Boat)
A Link to a Poem by
Christopher Howell:
Poems by Bill Yake
Butterflies and Whales
The swimmers sort seas with baleen:
bound mouth-combs of keratin-hair;
while the flyers probe wild blooms with siphons:
their proboscises paired and unwound.
All rise.
One kind in air. The other in brine.
One through kelp. The other from kinnikinnick.
Breech or spyhop, puddle or hilltop,
all breathe and are flexible. All flex, breathe
and breed: live-borne or twice-borne.
Some scaled in silver; some silvered
with barnacles. Vast or erratic,
double star or constellation, they arc
in their florescences and phosphorescences.
Throats bellow-pleated, some sound and sing.
Pheromones adrift: others dart silently frantic,
then perch. Plankton, wild mustard, spermand krill: grays and humpbacks hang in the sun,
slide beneath pack ice making nets of their exhalations,
while upslope, insects–the blues, elfins, and marbles–bask:
all those of the planet, and the whales as well.
The Lowly, Exalted
In the slow discovery of your home
how completely you feel your way.
Working among epiphytes and fallen
leaves – deliberate, silent as a separated
tongue – you push between liverworts,
nudge the double-winged samara
of maple seeds aside, and so go
further, slowly, on.
Maples loom and lean across
this gorge, this lighted slot of sky,
single October leaves dropping
a hundred feet in silent spirals.
Can you feel their shadows spin
and bump down in the dim ravine?
Our slight creek pours incessantly
from cobble bowl to stilling pool.
The thin sun ricochets and squirms,
lighting the dead fern – on the far bank –
silver. Hermaphrodite, glistening one,
keeled and skirted, slick and textured
as the skins of fallen fruit:
when confronted – your tentacles retreat
into your forehead,
when abandoned – you extend, languid,
deliberate; stretching for dim odors
and dusk – anticipating lichens, club mosses,
the mucus of another like yourself – detecting
as you go, in millimeter ripples,
every muted forest pulse.
Ending the Kenai Summer
September, and mountainsides of bloomed-out
fireweed set their hesitant seeds adrift.
Masked for sex then death, crimson sockeye spar
and spawn till, played out, they roll – stunned -
drift and wash ashore on banks, shallows,
gravel bars where bears and blowflies wait
to turn flesh to their flesh. Magpies, glinting
of wet skree and crusted snow, prepare to go,
purling – from snag to snag – as sunlight cuts
the clouds to slats of light. The way is empty,
and valleys turn toward solitude:
the wind and what it moves.
Poems by John Bradley
Earth Angel
1.
At the Colorado/Wyoming border
rising over the side of the road, shaggy
head and humped back saying: “buffalo”
white breath escaping open
mouth and nostrils, fugitive from what
sleeper’s dream, there at the edge
of prairie and interstate.
2.
On the sign that read
“CAMPSTOOL”
perched the meadowlark
supporting the weightless Wyoming sky.
3.
Western Nebraska
or was it eastern Wyoming
spring green grass
in the long tracks
to the still windmill.
4.
Outside Chicago
on the door
of a dumptruck lit
by yellow dust–
“EARTH ANGEL.”
On Hearing a Recording
of the Voice
of Walt Whitman
This voice can crack
river rock
or mend broken bone.
This voice can mend river rock
or crack
mended bone.
This voice poured Lincoln
a glass
of elderberry wine.
This voice poured Lincoln
into the roots
of elder trees.
I can hear stars
being born, stars dying
inside this voice.
I can hear lilacs
laying claim
to the soil,
the soil
laying claim to the lilacs
in this voice.
This voice churns
with the nebulae
churning inside
every voice.
This voice carries
everyone
even those
who do not believe
they are returning
back
to the source
of every voice.
(from Terrestrial Music, poems
by John Bradley, Curbstone Press, 2006)
Online Poems – Mary Oliver
Wild Geese, A Visitor, Mockingbirds, A Journey, Climbing the Chagrin River, The Swan
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/oliver/online_poems.htm
At Great Pond
http://mclibrary.nhmccd.edu/lit/olive2.html
The Chance to Love Everything
http://mclibrary.nhmccd.edu/lit/olive3.html
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/oliver/online_poems.htm
http://mclibrary.nhmccd.edu/lit/olive2.html
http://mclibrary.nhmccd.edu/lit/olive3.html
Poems by Bill Siverly
Steptoe Butte
As if stranded on an island a thousand feet high,
I watch the stubble fields like mats of light
Drifting on the brown October ocean
Toward farms, towns and hazy blue mountains.
Quartzite rose two hundred million years ago
On the coast of Pangaea’s western sea,
Later surrounded by waves of Columbia basalt,
And twelve thousand years of swirling glacial dust.
Coeur d’Alene and Palouse young men
Called this place eomoshtoss, power mountain,
And climbed to be alone with animal spirits,
Spirit of lightning flashing from low clouds.
Twelve hundred Palouse, Coeur d’Alene, and Spokane
Rode yelling down the hills of Pine Creek to challenge
Dashing Colonel Steptoe and his hundred fifty-two recruits.
After one day’s running fight and seven killed,
Steptoe fled the field under cover of night.
Thirty years later gregarious farmer James Davis,
Called Cashup, since he always paid cash,
Built a winding road and two-story hotel
That occupied the top of the butte, thirty by sixty feet.
People rarely made the arduous climb to his high enterprise,
And his wife Mary stayed in the farmhouse below,
So Cashup lived with wind and yawning distance.
After two hundred million years, the old man died alone.
In nineteen-eight, two boys set Cashup’s dream on fire,
Visible from every mountain, town, and farm
By old folks who were children then, dragged out of sleep
To witness Steptoe burning on the night’s primeval sea.
Rock
On Fish Creek Divide above the Clackamas River,
Where second-growth fir crowds close to the road
And varied thrushes dart upstream into the brush,
Autumn takes hold under clouds and constant rain.
Blocks of dusky andesite lie where they tumbled
Down the escarpment of an old quarry,
Shaped and cut by millions of years for men today
To pick natural bricks for garden walls.
Suddenly rain stops, clouds raise the horizon,
The king of the forest steps above the dripping terrain,
A mountain with snowy hair who unifies earth and sky.
Suddenly wind blows, clouds close in,
The king withdraws behind mist and rain.
Dark rocks fill the hands like wet mandalas,
Shiny images of the self, newly minted from ancient days,
Lives of ancestors long-buried in forgotten places,
Animal spirits who said things to women and men.
Down Fish Creek Divide on the Clackamas River,
A dipper flits from rock to rock in rough water,
Then dives and disappears for long minutes,
Only to reappear, somewhere downstream.
Oxeye Daisy
Oxeyes raised in gardens to cure nightsweats and coughs
Spread to all cleared land: pastures, railroads, roadsides.
Chrysanthemum leucanthemum: yellow disks and white petals
Bloom on thin stalks that thrive on dry soil and rocks.
Carried everywhere by seeds and rhizome shoots,
These bully Europeans crowd out the native species,
Their bitter leaves avoided by cattle and pigs,
But gladly grazed by horses, sheep and goats.
High in the Clackamas forest between May and August,
At a roadside where second growth has been logged out,
A field of oxeyes sweeps like a maudlin crowd toward Mt. Hood,
Their white and gold heads nodding in unison
As a cool breeze blows over the ridge and under the sun.
Montana and other western states consider oxeyes weeds
But cannot prevent their invasion of pasture land,
And so advise steep applications of 2,4-D or nitrogen,
And when those fail, the grazing of sheep and goats.
Oxeyes were sacred to ox-eyed Hera, who was
The indigenous cow-headed goddess of Greece.
Sacred to Artemis, oxeye tea relieved the pains of women,
And Celts believed daisies were souls of babies who died
the day they were born.
Online Poems – 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.
2
The next day I go back to say goodbye. He’s dead now. But he’s not. He’s a quarter mile farther up the shore. Today he is thinner, squatting on his stomach, head out. The ribs show more: each vertebra on the back under the coat is visible, shiny. He breathes in and out.
A wave comes in, touches his nose. He turns and looks at me — the eyes slanted; the crown of his head looks like a boy’s leather jacket bending over some bicycycle bars. He is taking a long time to die. The whiskers white as porcupine quills, the forehead slopes.
Goodbye, brother, die in the sound of the waves. Forgive us if we have killed you. Long live your race, your inner-tube race, so uncomfortable on the land, so comfortable in the ocean. Be comfortable in death, then, when the sand will be out of your nostrils, and you can swim in long loops through the pure death, ducking under as assassinations break above you. You don’t want to be touched by me. I climb the cliff and go home the other way.
The Cat in the Kitchen, Snowbanks North of the House, The Buried Train
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bly/onlinepoems.htm
Surprised by Evening, Waking from Sleep, Poem in Three Parts, Snowfall in the Afternoon, In a Train, Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter, Watering the Horse, After a Long Busyness, Counting Small-Boned Bodies, Looking into a Face, The Hermit, Insect Heads, Passing an Orchard by Train, Driving My Parents Home at Christmas, For My Son Noah Ten Years Old, At Mid-Ocean, In Rainy September
http://magics.l166.4everdns.com/waiwen/bly.htm
1
My God, he’s still alive. And a shock goes through me, as if a wall of my room had fallen away.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bly/onlinepoems.htm
http://magics.l166.4everdns.com/waiwen/bly.htm
