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

==

Building Faces from the Ocean     
                 

the moment of exchange with water and flesh in equal balance
destroyed by arms and flesh thrashing for their own sake,
                    muscles toned by disruption;
knowing which members of the orchestra to erase, depending 
     on the work,
like  a quilt becoming a modern sculpture with many holes & 
     partial patterns
we can extemporize to intersecting planes of fabric
sketching, from sand to storm, the 6-dimensional flexibility of
             gravity    wind    cellbonds    waste    & need:
                    
the beige tympanum throbs 4 times a day—
                                             we cannot hear it
but come to the call, trying to read the walls of milky jade
crashing into pre-syllabic foam we grab a palm full and repeat 
     for days,
thinking the energy will not be dampened by asphalt & sheetrock,
by the apollonian tides of commuter, the rich chords that
           ghost crabs, sand lice, & clams geyser up through the sand
                               praising the water’s diaphragm
                               flexing more miles than I’ll ever drive
unless I’m racing the moon from Atlantic to Pacific
on a surfboard of fuel-efficient water surged by bridging polarities,
where all invasions begin:
         
                                                the ring of fire
              where earth pulls back to edit,   to reform,
                   where land is not the battlefield but the prize,
sharing only the rain and the ocean, the fish like brush
we need to get out of the way and like the flavor of—
                                    an easy place to get fat.
                        

       
                  ==   

[untitled]
  

i hear ducks
                long gone south
as rain never follows the same path but
seen in another scale is so many ounces per yard
        soaking    sweating    converting
                          making gaps in the soil/skin
   punching larvae’s time clocks and survival systems
                
            A holy man
                can be in the rain
      going nowhere
              brimming with the information
                           all the tastes in one drop
                                    good as it lasts
          an instant & forever  
               where has this been
                          broken from the air
           chlorophyll webs incant to decant
        
         as if our blood
                           also clocking
                to change with the seasons
             each latitude its own blood mix
      the dna grid reacting to geo-magnetic here
                  from loco to logo
                  
   crazy without a place     as if names were where
          maps distorted to have corners
            human scale a hand over hand rendering
            
            As a certain tilt of the earth
               calls the birds back
       wings just a way of making fire,
                  of putting space behind them
                     
       as these dance steps
       defined by leg,  gland,  moonset,   cellclocks,
                      energy gasming in eye walls
                 
                              this complex choreography
                         simple as a 2-step, a 3-chord blues
    makes all possible:
            
                          sprout of time
                            rout of death
                   welcoming the shed of 
                        this skin-mind fraught with hurries
                       
                 to get to that freedom
              home tilting toward us
                   earth sprouting for our arrival        
                 
                   

==             

The Year Starts Dark

           
   
morning must be brighter than this
like the sun left but didn’t close the door
the difference between internal and external shapes
how the body sculpts,   stores,    moves around
                                     where does the light come in
when clothes are forgotten, when skin stays in its own yard
as if the power had gone out and wont come back, diverted  
     & rationed
as if I have to show my ID to get to a neighborhood with light
the sky heavy but unyielding,
like the angry so-disappointed glare of a parent you wish would 
     start yelling
so there was hope of a better tomorrow
or the sky feels inadequate for letting in as much light as it does
when car headlights are on at 10 am I know this isnt the world I went 
     to sleep in
the school buses are beige instead of yellow
I see a straight seam in the horizon
no one walks,  everyone rides.        
if I went to the top of mount scott would I hit my head on the clouds,
would they shy away from me, would the cloud grab my head
and suck the rest of me up into its maw, as if the cloud a whale 
     swallowing me,
about to ram into snowy cascades & me without a gps or snow glasses
flapping my wet gore-tex above the ski lifts
settling into the gray like a leaf thick crevasse
rain cant touch me when im asleep
heat worms transforming water into flame
as if plaster wont crumble when I touch it
as if the window I tried to open would reveal its liquid memory
the ceiling is 3 inches closer cause im floating above the floor
eclipsing the negative light coming through my bodys uninsulated 
     windows
my stomach like a garage door any remote can activate
I learn to sing the channels, to increase volume with a chord
but i cant sing heat or rain, I can only recreate the sun that’s been 
     through me:
instead of gutters I have bones to sluice the rain away,
bones gray enough to see through. as some water always stays behind,
pockets full of trade,  rumors of skies you can see across, clouds as 
     decoration not command.

when, if you knew the date, you knew the weather 
  
  

  ==
                                                  

Corn
   

the more the cornstalks hear the thicker they grow
freezing the moon in yellow crescent, the sky clear
but starless, droning that can’t not pulse.
        
to wrap ourselves inside the concentric green:
tomatoes chambered like the heart, beans like space canoes,
the long-houses of squash, grasses feathering the sky,
revealing the bricks within the air that can be removed
to crawl through into green-sun-land
where the walking people are never hungry
& those who kill are paralyzed & malnourish::
                   
in its cycle, the green sun multiplies;
with the 7th sun comes a mist of faces, a rain of
inundating sweet, a sleep where skin is shed   bones
return beneath the clay   spirits reveal their
blue & orange gem-turds of memory   & children fly
to breasts resonant as drums::
                     
the first corn goes to the crows,
then there’s enough for everyone to get sick & sleep,
corn milk to rub into your lovers skin, corn silk
to bring back the sun in winter, cobs for tricks
& reflexes, stalks the earth uses
like straws like telescopes to connect & trade
with all the winds, to hear the stars’ legends
repeated like another layer of loam
                

      
 ==   
         

Six Poems by James Bertolino
            

The Distances 

Over the patterned feathers
and up the elegant curved neck
of the heron, to where the point
         
of its beak seems to touch
the snowfields on Mt. Baker:
        
that great space between
the island and the mountain opens,
and someone steps off through
the seven distances
             
to where the high cooling light
becomes a doorway.

       
    
==

Nuthatch & Dragonfly

                   
        
A feathered projectile,
the nuthatch drills the air
between trees, then leaps
         
like a superhero from branch
to limb. Now it stops, enthralled
by an electric blue dragonfly
               
hovering over the pond––
it slips sideways, backwards, each time
tilting its bulbed eyes toward the bird. 
                    
The nuthatch realizes it is being mocked,
looks to another grove, and flies off.
            

            
  == 

Pathetic Cries
           

Yes, there are pathetic cries–
we’ve all heard them, and have felt
our composure collapse.
           
My friend and I were on the bench
at the pond––reading to each other,
making notes, and sharing
the pleasure of cold beer.
         
What we heard sounded like a bird
in distress, a young one, and Anita set off
to find it, moving closer
to the bushes near the water‘s edge.
                                   
“It’s here,” she shouted.
I went around to approach from
the other side of the foliage and saplings.
Then we moved toward each other
to find the wounded, or lost.
                        
“Look,” she whispered, “a snake.”
She’d seen its tail thrash.
But I saw a broad head and glistening eyes,
and behind it the snake’s jaw distended
over the plump thigh of the frog
whose leg it had swallowed.
                     
We heard that heart-disturbing cry again.
                     
I picked up the snake––a thick,
three-foot garter––and tried to gently
work the frog’s limb free of its throat.
The snake wrapped its glossy length around my wrist
and hand––deep greenish black with bright
red stripes. Beautiful.
               
My strategy wasn‘t effective, and seemed unkind
to the frog. We knew there was no way
the snake could succeed, and decided if we threw them
together, in their awful connection
to the water, perhaps the frog might get free
when the snake went to the surface
to breathe.
                
So with both hands I tossed them over the pond.
            
When they came up, the snake writhed
like an anaconda among the lily pads.
It splashed and shook, not wanting
and perhaps unable
to release its prey.
                 
When they disappeared, we waited,
watched for any sign.
They had simply gone under, and
we’d become smaller. Didn’t know
what to feel.                   

 ==
                    

Mountain Lullaby      
         

May your sleep follow
the mammal of four wishes,
and your fists unfold
to blossoms of pink.
           
My your fears lapse
like fallen leaves, and may wind
in the bare trees
purify your breathing.
          
May moonlight on the mountains
bring a song of gathering, and the soul
of water enter your dreams
to teach you symbiosis
            
the way your first lover
taught you to kiss.
           

  ==  
       
             

Minute
       
           
Dew-drop mountains
roll immensely 
        
down each leaf, while
hummingbirds pinch minutes 
                   
stretched by the ponderous
thought of the worm. 

 ==                            

Praise
             

Let us praise the poetry of pinking
shears, sharecroppers, potsherds, 
                     
honey-slaked peers, skates,
air, golden-spoked prayer books,
           
and koala bears that rub their noses
in the spice of Spring.
  

 ==                                          
              

A Poem by Bill Tremblay
 

On Easter Hill

            
          
1.         
     
Caterpillar rippling across grey rock,
you carry a Persian rug upon your back.
            
Soft tan
with black stripes down each side
& within them
one strand of gold.

2.
    
Small white clouds launch themselves off
Horsetooth Ridge. Crossing the low waters
their bottoms flatten–footprints of angels.
                 
                
   
3.
         
Distant snowy tops of the Mummy Range
covered with Walt Whitman’s hair.
 

                  
4.
        
Pick up a chip of pine. Trace its grain,
its season of sun & ice.
      
Turn it over.
A fish appears–a pickerel, jutting it lower law out
& then a New York cabdriver barking
“Whatcha gawkin’ at, buster?”
              
             

5.
              
Carry this away. Not the cloud or stone of it.
The manner of it.
         
Turn yourself over.
Who is this new person
with a voice to answer the things of this world?
Offer a wedding ring.
     

      (from The Anarchist Heart by Bill Tremblay, New Rivers Press, 1979)

    ==
                                             

Five Poems by Bill Hotchkiss
     

Semester’s End

               (December 13, 2007)

It’s two in the afternoon, last day of the term,
Incipient winter rich in the air as I walk
Across campus, a bundle of papers in hand.
          
Clouds form and abate, afternoon light
Touches the needles of a young ponderosa,
Just so, and each glows, radiates brilliance.
           
The pond water is still, reflects perfect
Trees and buildings, and the big perch glide
Slowly, not even disturbing the surface.
             
Stormclouds rise in the west, moving inland–
They’ll bring rain after sundown, red sundown,
And I am walking away, not even limping,
I stride eagerly now toward this oncoming storm.         

==

Girl in a Lime-Green Dress
     
                   
The fields are summer brown.
             
In the bare front yard
Of a farmer’s shack near Honcut
Beneath gray skies
A little girl in a lime-green dress,
She’s wearing a pair of red plastic glasses.
             
Yellow hair all atumble,
The child leans forward
Like a bird of prey
And spits on the dusty earth.

      
                       
                    == 

Satch and Dick and the Bear
      

I wasn’t there, mind you,
But Dick told me the story,
And he never exaggerates.
         
He was in the side ravine, working
To reset his water tank, and big
White Satch the Akita asleep
        
Beneath a manzanita, when
Down the hill a considerable bear
Came wandering, not expecting
         
Human or canine company:
Dick stood up, waved his arms,
And the bear stopped, peered
           
Downslope, then began a heaving
Ascent of the canyon, breaking deadwood
And thrashing through poison oak.
          
Dick shook his head, looked down
At Satch the dog, still asleep, oblivious,
Dreaming of cats, completely at peace.
            
                    

 ==
     

The Winter is Here
          

                         
I do not regret it, but now the year draws short–
Light snowfall dusts the Sierra, and all streams
Are low in their beds.  Yuba is sunk in its boulder trench,
While trout and pike alike glide slow and dreamy
In glass-clear image-water–the alders and aspens
Are yellow above and in pools, yellow leaves
Drift down though no wind stirs them, and yellow
Alights upon yellow, with leaf disfiguring leaf.
            
The seasons of man and woman are brief,
New year devours the old–Janus, it may be,
Looks back in sad joy, forward in troubled
Anticipation, may the temple doors stand closed:
But new year comes at a time of deep cold.  Life’s
Arrested, the oaks  forlorn, only the moss ablaze.   

 ==
                   

            
            
For Granddaughter Lee-Marie

       (Late October, 2007)

Child, you stand in the springtime of life
As I write this, though the month’s October:
I see you playing outside, at the base of an oak,
When sudden a burst of autumn wildwind
Rattles the yellow, leaf traces release, leaves
Spiral downward.  Quickly you turn, laugh,
Stare in surprise as a current of shimmer
Spins near, and you reach out both hands
To capture deciduous bright portions of gold.
   

                   
 
 ==
                                   

A Poem by Sue Pesznecker

Hawthorne in Winter

                
As the Wheel turns toward
Solstice,
an unseen hand decks the hawthorn
with red berries
and chickadee trim.
The Mother is cold,
arms skeletal yet still
encircling life.
Berries festoon bare branches
like bits of spun fire,
while tuxedoed chickadees waltz
to their own Yule carols among
a tinsel
of winter gold leaves,
spinning from branch to branch and
dancing in the wind.
    

   ==  

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) 

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

The Moth

As Your hand holds the feverish moth
          what glow of energy compels its wings to strike
                       with all their strength
          out of their darkness

The Amazon          a drop of sweat on Your brow
                         oceans trickle through
                                                 Your fingers as You refresh Yourself
                         in the morning of every millennium    

           
                         Our planet is a blue apple
                in Your orchard        The zephyrs roam through space
                                       gently shaking the stars
                                               that are all plums and apricots 
             

                              Your hand releases its captive
the moth flies freely toward its own enlightenment
                                                                     and its own good night

These words are my first to love Your absence Goed
and I shall never diminish You with praise again
                                                               You Who are perfect
                                                         Who have opened Your hand
                                        and allowed all the power there is
                                                                                               to lose itself
                                                         among Earth’s creatures
                     we who still           foolishly
                                                          cluster about its radiance

               
           
         

Dawn Vision: Hot & Cool
        

                                                                         A few bones
                                                             a few stones
                   Rio Grande dry again
            avenue of mud through the middle of Albuquerque
                                 sky immured
                                                           in its rented cradle
An Indian has opened his Mexican eyes            it is morning
                                                                               a green vehicle drifts
              in the distance        in dilatory passage via a frontage road
                    Burnt-out wind
                                                           a few bones
                                                   a few stones
The mind is an anvil the blows are heavy    
                                                               Black Indian bronze Jew
                                                                                   no others will do
Four years rocking to and fro across the dead duke’s city
                                                          and still the deep maroon chiles
                                         dangling in clusters by doorways
               are creatures of a song
                                                         whose seeds are bitter
                                                                                                  are strong
               Slag-black earth
                                             the orchards are few
               The mind is a fragment of desert
where all detritus is baked anew
                            Always the Jew’s Mosaic daydream in a clay or stone
                                  the blue-skinned messenger is on his way

(from The Old Man Who Swam Away and Left Only
His Wet Feet, by Gene Frumkin, La Alameda Press, 1998)

Prose Poems by Charles Goodrich

Seven Sorties on the Garden

1.  Calico

     Sixteen years old and crippled with arthritis, her cloudy eyes leaked fluid.  She couldn’t have weighed more than a half gallon of milk.  We talked about putting her down, but if you scratched her behind the ear, she would purr until she couldn’t catch a breath.  And she’d still hobble over to the dish for her kibbles.

     This morning, I found her on her pillow, cold and empty, lighter than a bird.  My wife wrapped her in a scrap of wool tartan, and I went to dig a grave between the lilacs.  My first shovel of earth came up full of new potatoes, the size of eggs.

     I know nothing about the transmigration of souls, but I made potato salad for supper; and we talked about what kind of bird a cat might become.
      

2.  Drip

     The nurse swabs antiseptic on my knee.  It smells like spinach with lime.  My stomach rumbles.  “Hungry are we?” she asks.  I can’t see her mouth behind the mask, so I stare right into her eyes, and she stares back.

     The first time they reamed out this knee, I watched it live on the video screen.  The bone was whiter than teeth.  There was hardly any blood.  The surgeon told us his favorite marinade for grilled snapper–lemon, paprika, and ginger–while his tiny pneumatic scissors trimmed my meniscus.

     Now the anesthesiologist slides an IV needle into my arm.  “What’ll it be this time–the epidural or the full monte?”  Suddenly I remember–I left the drip irrigation running in the garden.  Shit.  Too late to call home.  If the potatoes get scab, I’ll kick myself.
                 

3.  Crow

     Still thinking about that crow I saw flying over the park this morning.  He kept stalling in mid-flight and falling a couple of feet before he’d flap his wings and fly again.  And he was crying out, over and over, in a wretched, faltering voice.

     You know those crow calls–the grouchy command, the simpering whine, the gargle, the shout?  Well, this was different, full of heartbreak or woe.  If he were my friend, I’d be worried about him.
             

4.  Ground Zero

     After a friend phones to tell me–Two planes, she says, right into the Towers–I go straight to the garden.  Harvest, I tell myself.  Harvest, and clean up, and sow a cover crop.  In the corn patch only a few sad ears remain.  I yank them off, then chop the stalks and dump them in the compost bins.  Where the lemon cucumbers have sprawled between the corn rows, I find overgrown fruits, hard and dark.  I lob them toward the bins, feeling a twinge of satisfaction when I hear one hit a post and burst open.

     I tug too hard at the carrot-tops and they tear off, so I dig the carrots out with the spading fork.  Carrots sprawl in the dirt like startled fish.  I pull up two rows of bush beans and knock the earth from their roots.  Dry seeds rattle in the overgrown pods.  I strip one open with my thumb, and stuff a few black seeds in my pocket.

     The lettuce plants have all bolted.  I rip off a leaf of romaine and the stem oozes milky fluid.  I take a bite–it’s terribly bitter.  I eat it, then another.  Suddenly weary, I wash the tools and put them away, brush the leaf-mold from the my jeans.  I’ve skinned a knuckle somehow.  As I suck at the dirt and blood, a squadron of crows–seven or eight of them–drop into the garden to scavenge what’s left.
             

5.  Truck Garden

     My first wife and I rented a little bungalow in the center of town.  We were young.  Our furniture was nothing but apple crates.

     The backyard butted up to a Ford dealer.  There was a wall of new pickup trucks at the end of our garden.  We planted everything we could dream of, even rutabagas.  She had sweet peas climbing the downspouts; I grew peanuts in buckets on the back porch.  She brought home two kittens, Basil and Sage, but they both died and we buried them under the juniper.

     Before anything was ripe, the Ford guy bought the place, evicted us, bulldozed the house, and paved the yard.  Thirty years later, I still think of those cats buried under that asphalt. And who knows what else.
         

6.  Small Engines

     They have carried my neighbor’s tilt-up bed into the living room so he can watch the outside world go by.  A couple of the grandkids have planted a pressure-treated 4 x 4 in the front yard, mounted a new birdfeeder, and filled it with sunflower seeds and millet.

     Twenty years we’ve lived next door to one another.  Have we ever once talked about birds?  Only the weather, or sometimes the inner workings of small engines.

     The hospice lady has just left.  Chickadees flock to the new feeder.  I can see my old friend gazing out his window.  I’ve known him so little, hardly at all.  How very strange to be here now, in our separate lives, watching the same birds.
                

7.  Wild Geese

     I’m picking beans when the geese fly over, Blue Lake pole beans I figure to blanch and freeze.  Maybe pickle some dilly beans.  And there will be more beans to give to the neighbors, forcibly if necessary.

     The geese come over so low I can hear their wings creak.  I can see their tail feathers making fine adjustments.  They slip-stream along so gracefully, riding on each other’s wind, surfing the sky.  Maybe after the harvest I’ll head south.  Somebody told me Puerto Vallarta is nice. I’d be happy with a cheap room.  Rice and beans for every meal.  Swim a little, lay on the beach.

     Who are you kidding, Charles?  You don’t like to leave home in the winter.  Spring, fall, or summer either.  True.  but I do love to watch those wild geese fly over, feel those impertinent desires glide through me.  Then get back to work.

(from Northwest Review, permission of Charles Goodrich, 2007)
 

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

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.

               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.

      
Poems by Thomas R. Smith      

              
Winter Hours   
   

First snow lies loosely on the November
grass. It will go before it comes to stay.
Piano of earth plays a cold music.
Stick-on letters of the Dairy Queen sign
announce Winter Hours. The days are a cup
slowly filling with darkness. We must drink
until we see clearly to the bottom.

The Sun
  

Tracks in the foot-deep snow
have captured the last shakings
from the chokecherry tree,
as if some green man walked here.
             
I sing the sun, keeper of light
while our lights falter, while waking
we sleep, mired in routine,
and in dreams we ramble.
             
The greater life sensed remotely
is the sound of gnawing
beneath the bright, hard wood
we face the world with.
         
We can’t see it, but it is there
like coronas with which the sun
veils itself, bridges that burn themselves
a hundred thousand miles in space.

             
Krista at Fifty
  

You’re fair as the equinox that gives half
the day to the light and half to the dark.
I love your laughter, red as a basket
of strawberries. When you enter the room,
the moment takes out its rubies to show.
             
You’re a green cress-leaf in the winter stream.
You’re a bear foraging in noon meadows.
You’re the rainbow that lanterns the grey clouds.
You’re a dancer and also a mirror-
ball throwing sparks to your dancing partner.
          
You grant the caught fish of your delight its
freedom–give it back, give it back to Love.
You save the years by spending them, and grow
rich on the interest.  You don’t take prisoners.
Your feet touch the earth, and it is summer.

     
                    

  

Reading Kenneth Patchen Again

              
Propped on his side, a man in great pain writes:
“Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful.”
Oh what sort of world requires suffering to make
lovers so lovely?  Those whom the rainy beasts
visit in their beds are the truly blessed!
The children of tenderness eat from the hand
of the one whose face has gone to Paradise.

         

(from Waking before Dawn,  Thomas 
R. Smith, Red Dragonfly Press, 2007)

              

                    

         

A Link to Poems by Dan Raphael

in the M Review

• Must All Things

• Cloud Pond

• Winter in the City

• Some Say the Year Begins in Ice
             

                

                    

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)
 

      

   

Poems by Derek Sheffield

 

 

Oystermen
  

What comfort to see them trudge on the tideland
back and forth with nets and buckets,
dredging for puddles of ripened, lung-shaped oysters. 
Bundles of thick coats and boots, they plant lanterns
and hunker in small glows to pick
secret after knobby, clicking secret.
 
Lowest tides draw them late night down
the bank of surf grass, crunching sand dollars
and crab shells, clattering from the rocks
and slurching to their muddy bed while I slip
into mine.  With slowing eyes, I watch them roam
and dazzle like prehistoric fireflies, 

call out over the blue-green mussel worm
that twists a slimed gleam in the muck,
the severed arm of the six-rayed star,
and puffed rock weed that always seems
to finger back.  The one with the roughest hands
keeps to himself until a dying fire
coaxes him open for the children. 

As I wake before dawn, they are there
with gathered breath steaming as they spangle
the wet emptiness and clump in mud-heavied boots.
As their joggled lanterns shuck
bright lumps out of the dark, 

I want to surge down and labor shoulder
to shoulder, grab the ridged, slippery shells
in my pale hands, break each gritty fruit
from its cluster and become something other
than their midden ghosting the shore,
the relinquishing moon of jellyfish—to do
once more a work of weight, of being
one of the dark shapes among the lights
before the cold sea climbs my legs.  
                                                                                   

(first published in Poetry Northwest)
   
   
   

Pillbugs

Segmented multi-legged skin ticklers, 
     they feelered up fingers, 
          centimetered slate, wayward shells
through slanted arm hairs,  
     a light touch on the nape.
          When we nudged a quake
or whispered a gust, 
     they were quick to perform 
          their terrestrial crustacean trick,
curling themselves into marbles.  
     Across lemon-colored linoleum
          we flicked them, our huge mouths
laughing.  And when we lay 
     still, watching, 
          they opened again
a soft place. 

(first appeared in Talking River Review)

    

     

When in Doubt, Try Northwest 
   

The corn went crazy when I left,
jerking and hopping golden jubilee
as when the train shuts that town
down.  A smoky muser whistled
through coffee and a gap, pulled
his cap and agreed it didn’t used to be
like this.  I took off like a Ford-
swearing farmer cruising new crops. 
Just as the last tomatoes were fished
from the garden, a few remaining peaches
sliced and eaten, as grass fields smoked
and geese beat south, I fled
to a red-eyed city in the rain.
 

  

Elegy for Bob Ross of Public TV 
    

Let’s begin thinking about the bard of shades,
how years after he left us for another landscape
we replay him for the aspiring, the overly lonely
who turn finally to this dabbler dressed in long-
collared, primary-colored shirts, pants hinting
width around the ankles, this crooner whose voice
begins high as lazuli buntings all warbling
from pine-tops before bouldering down
to waves, easing as velvet spills from canvas.
    
One stranded afternoon, a chance of channel,
framed in motel wood, he found me.  I listened
as knife scraped palette to mix the oils, brush flipper-
flapped against wood as a duck dries wings.  He said
I had my own world where sap-green and cadmium-yellow
bloomed a lively meadow, where prussian-blue
and titanium-white merged into sky, the sun a blob of ochre. 
From empty hands and easel-less rooms
I listened.  At last, here is my vision.  
  
If only he could step from the screen for this unveiling,
brush in hand, ready to drink the town canary.
I dab my last dab and, as he advised, step back
to see evergreens edging a lake, a scattering of little bushes
climbing the shadows of a snowy range and . . . what’s this?
glittering in the lake’s virescence, his frizzy visage. 
I lean in to see how wind sneaks a ripple into his smile,
how bristling needles flare his hair, and hear
his voice swishing back and forth in long grasses.

  
(“When in Doubt” and “Elegy” from A Mouthpiece of Thumbs,
Derek Sheffield, Blue Begonia Press)

    

  

   
Poems by Verlena Orr
 

  

Gentian Blues
  

The color of the right word
may sound like rain
when this late July wind
whispers November.
   
Today clouds over.
Fresh water falls to lean on.
My mind turns to Montana
where you propped me up.
    
A shell remains
as blood flows west.
My bones ache
with the slightest sigh.
   
Bruised blue, I wait
for some comfort,
burgundy hope, healing
carmine, scarlet heat of the heart.
     
Today, you are safely tucked
into the earth, and almost all the birds
remember to begin again,
no matter how late or dark the dawn.
 

      

   

   

The Scenic Square Root to the Divide

                    “Third-rate Romance,
                           Low-rent Rendevous.”
                                   –Amazing Rhythm Aces
  
Dazzled by the light of dead stars,            
  
            the woman trusts her dream,
            free falls
            without a second chute.

She soldiers home, dares deer
hunters to line her up in the cross-hairs.           
    
            The soggy Olympic Range nags her
            west, pulls on her skirt to go its way—
            the wrong way to Montana

where the drowned wait for spring breakup,
release from The Kicking Horse Reservoir,
where rivers have terrible tempers,
and snow tells the truth.           
   
            The grieving North Star holds her hand,
            turns her east of the cascades, lights one
            path to freedom east of Coueur d’Alene
            through treachery of The Fourth of July Pass.

She finds the trail in the Bitterroots,
names stray clouds like adopted children,
speaks in tongues with magpies as she is
fostered and loved by the big forgiving sky.
 

(from One More Time from the Beginning, Verlena
Orr, Stone City Press, 2007)

     
 
Benediction for Gulls Making Love
   

Gallantly he stands on her back
wings slightly open, carefully finding
his footing, sparing her, inamorata,
the full weight burden of his feathers,

hollow bones.  In common, drive
by Darwin, I share their light
of this morning’s one candle,
the rising sun.
   
In small surrenders, she lowers
her neck and head, accepts him,
inamorato.  No struggle or shrill protest.
Only her willingness.

I feel a catch of breath in the universe,
the collection for this day’s offering.
Each day arrives—tabula rasa.
We love this first time, and each time
will be the first and the last.

I like to believe you will wait with me,
our turn to lean into rain, ignore
small craft advisories high wind ignites.
 
Unashamed, the gulls part and preen.
Out of reach as erotic dancers
they deftly smooth each feather
into its proper place, their peace
between sky and water.
 
I’ve found them just in time
moving into my heart’s fourth dream,
the one where I can fly.
 

(from Break in the Cloud Cover, Verlena Orr,
Howlet Press, 2005)

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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

Salmon Speaks
  

Grandmother and grandfather swam
The humming river before it was befouled
With pesticides and bleaches, its soul
Broken by dams, turbines, dredges. 
    
The old stories were fishtailed in sand,
In pictures on canyon walls.
We knew the joy of fresh water
Roaring past our gills.

We taught First People courage—
How to take flow and force head on.
We showed them honor; we sang
Our death songs in spawning pools.
    
Our brilliant eggs mothered clans
And words.  From round fish mouth
Came the sounds moon and drum.
Leaping through the taut skin
   
Of pools we saw stars flash
In our scales; fish eye mirrored
The core of the Hourglass Nebula,
And otoliths the navigation of light.

–Seattle, 1997

(from down wind, down river, New
and Selected Poems, William Witherup,
West End Press, 2000)

Global Warming

     I
 
The hummingbird’s bill
Needles toward our future,
Where there may be less nectar
For all of us.
His tongue was stuck out –
As if trying to suck sugar
From an icy sky.
  

     II 
  
The mare galloped up to me
At the abandoned gas station.
She nuzzled my neck
To lick the sweat.

It was 110 degrees
In the shade –
Yet there were ice knots
In her mane.
    

Poems by Tim McNulty

Night, Sourdough Mountain Lookout
    

A late-summer sun
threads the needles of McMillan Spires
and disappears in a reef of coral cloud.
  
Winds roil the mountain trees, 
batter the shutter props.
  
I light a candle with the coming dark.
Its reflection in the window glass
flickers over mountains and 
shadowed valleys
seventeen miles north to Canada.
  
Not another light.
  
The lookout is a dim star
anchored to a rib of the planet
like a skiff to a shoal 
in a wheeling sea of stars.
  
Night sky at full flood.
  
Wildly awake.
  
   

Snowmelt
   

Fetching water from a small
snowmelt tarn on the ridge,
kneeling on step-stones as the pool
shrinks by the day.
  
Late summer of a dry year.
  
All around me are footprints :
     delicate tracks of 
small deer,
     nimble handprints of raccoons.
     Traces of smaller mammals – 
chipmunk and deer mouse – 
all gathered
in a comradely circle of drying mud.
  
High winds up the Skagit 
pile dark-bottomed clouds 
against peaks and snowfields. 
Summits to the west and south 
obscured.
  
Dipper and two-gallon plastic jug.
  
Rinse my face in a last pool 
of winter snow
as the mountains gather 
the first fall storm
like an animal come to drink.

The End of the Ocean
   

High clouds at dawn
and finger tracings of moisture
in the eastern sky.
  
From beyond the western rim
of mountains,
ocean’s breath floods the valley.
  
Mist spills over high ridges.
  
One by one, the peaks
wink out.  Soon, the lookout 
is wrapped in blowing cloud.
  
Wetness drips from propped shutters.
The visible world
beyond misted windows, 
an isthmus of rock and heather.
  
“I stood as one stupefied,”
wrote Petrarch.
“I looked down and saw 
the clouds lay beneath my feet.  
I felt as if 
another.” 
  
Clark’s nutcracker dips from a cloud, 
lights on a hemlock limb
and calls: once, twice…
  
“No bird who flies
knows the limits of the sky,”
says Dogen,
“no fish who swims, the end
of the ocean.”

Tropical Sunlight

Smoke from wildfires fills the valleys,
and a high veil of cirrus  
dampens the morning sun.
Then a gift from Costa Rican forests –
Townsend’s warbler drops by.
  
Sunlit yellow face and breast,
dark Zorro-like mask,
quickly, neatly, shakes down
a subalpine fir crown
for bugs,
cleans his beak madly on a limb, 
and takes leave south 
across the Skagit,
heading back.
  
From the lookout steps,
three thousand miles north,
I’m warmed through.
  

Poems by Lisa Zimmerman       

Coyotes in the Ditch  

   
Sometimes in summer we wake
to their high-pitched chorus
carried across the rope of sleep.
Night sky abates and becomes
pasture, becomes singing—
horses stir and rustle,
the moon’s white fangs pierce
chinks in the barn.
     
When you tell me you listened
to a pack in full daylight
take an animal down, bone by bone
in the snowy ditch—
we imagine a February calf
as the prize, imagine
the tender throat exposed.
All day you couldn’t shake
that gleeful barking.
       
Tonight the farmer’s cows across the road
low endlessly, their calves vanished
into the dark interior of trucks at dawn.
Beyond the string of fence the coyotes
begin their refrain.         
     

    

Winter, Spring, Summer,
  
       Fall Again         

               
Small black cat carries
the dead mouse to the door, ice
circles the witness moon.      
  
Under the barn floor
the dog and I hear squeaking.
Swallows guard their eggs.   
   
August heat glimmers,
white sequins litter the lake.
I wish for fireflies. 
   
Leaves cling to the boy’s
boots. Darkness enters early.
Windows close their eyes.            
   

   
River Rising                  
                          

Winter shrank into itself
so dry the peach tree came down
with one hatchet blow
and the mock orange beside
the bedroom window barely whispered
    
a fragrance.
Only today the iris fill
like purple cups with rain
and the river rises into pastures.
New foals lean, unsteady,
against their mothers, dark
and quiet beneath fronds of water
bodies heavy
with something-
how the world, to them,
gives and takes, gives
and takes, how easy it is
to bear it.      

(originally in The Portland Review)

Online Poems – Elizabeth Bishop 

Poems by Barbara LaMorticella    

FISHING             
     
                        

“Full Dark at 5 PM.
Winter Comes to the River.”      
                        
Some words just strike me when I hear them
as so tasty I might make a meal of them
or so cool they’re like a hole in the ice
and I’m an Eskimo.
   
Me and my Eskimo hunker down around the
     arctic circle
fishing. At our age we’ve learned to go slow.
Dropping our lines into the holes,
we chew each word we catch for days on end,
as if it were a fish.
   
We’re looking for the essential vitamin,
     Vitamin P:
P’s, P’s and Power, Politics and Poetry,
Pencils and Paper, Pussies and Penises—
   
This is all highly irregular!
   
Even here in the State of Anemia,
even here at the intersection of so many coasts
most of my people don’t have much of an appetite
for fish full of Vitamin P. Throats up and
Force-fed consumerism like geese…

Pardon me while I blubber.

All day long the poplars are subject to
spells of sudden shivering.
The last flocks of leaves lift off
float like golden butterflies onto the water.  

            

The Underground Economy

    

1.
Twenty-five years we lived in the woods
in a house with no locks
while the trees breathed and grew.
We thought they were giants, our mysterious
     companions,
but all the while they were really money.
  
Now they’ve been extracted like teeth
and the bare hills gape.
And if the land comes back green
it’ll come back without giants
for the new world is crafted by cash
and cash is a low thing.
  
Don’t get me wrong–
I like snakes and worms.
   
But in the language of cash
everything is abstracted to “zero”–
eyes, hair and skin, fins, wings and seeds–
even the sun in the sky grows hollow
as a sucked egg,
and the earth itself becomes zeroed
on the spindle of some dark star.

2.  

I cried when I saw the picture of the onion man
draped in his pungent necklaces, riding his
bicycle through the streets of Normandy,
calling:
                         “Onions! Onions!”
    
Maybe it was simply the onions,
or knowing how far the onion man needs to ride
peddling like crazy

to get out of the sea of red ink
where we owe each other so many millions
that we can pay only by breaking the earth into dust,
and the dust into atoms,
and the atoms into zeroes,
nothing at all.

  

3.   

An onion is a zero
that has put on flesh,
a wedding where the sky and sun
have lain down together in the dirt.
    
They were married in an underground cathedral
all flames and transparencies
walls of glass that open for bicycles
and little horses of tears.
    
The economy of trillions
is a divorce decree:
The faces of the families are rubbed out,
the furniture is thrown onto the sidewalk,
and the children are scattered,
and sent wandering, homeless.
   
But the economy of onions
marries us to the whole earth.
The wedding guests offer up their gifts
without shyness:
   
Globes of white flowers,
bulbs fiery with juices,
the big bang of vegetables–
    
Creation that keeps happening
again and again.

(from Rain on Waterless Mountain,
Barbara LaMorticella, 26 Books, 1996)

           

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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)
                 

Skunk Cabbage
             

There are days, whole days when
the fingernails feel they are not changing.
     
And the hands fall asleep, wake up weary
in the dark like a child, and the alders,
    
part whip, part scrawl, chatter like the night
birds, asleep except for the light in the lake
    
of the dream, all muscle, all rope pulling
the heart like a balloon deeper down. Maybe
   
the morning is asking a question: two buttery
palms praying around the candle of green corn,
    
the leaves split into yellows and blues,
the afterimage an orange cataract, the room
    
a little warmer now and slick with rain, the child
asleep who dreams you don’t know her.

(from The Bitter Oleander Volume 12 Number 2)

Poems by Leigh Faulkner
           
  

With No Ice in the Gulf  

         
With no ice in the gulf, the grey seals whelped on land,
only to have the young carried away by storm surge
and drowned or washed of all scent, so they were
rejected and starved, 

while their milk-bloated mothers roamed the beaches
in primitive agony. This isn’t bronze or marble or oil
or even words.
When I was a child, I was mystified by the words 

arced across the wall above the pulpit:
The beauty of holiness.
Later, I learned the Keatsean alternative
and was satisfied for a time; but now  

I distrust claims of beauty––accept instead the truth
of death in all its forms,
except those that bear the signs
of careless sanctification and beatification.

The Setting February Sun
    

The setting February sun fires the dry rice stubble,
and for a brief time the shinkansen casts a golden wake
over the villages and up the hillsides;
I might have been back on the Tantramar,                      

waiting for another ghazal to find shape
in the wind-matted, frost-brittle marsh grass
and cattails; or I might have been
on the breakwater in Ierapetra,             

again stunned by the power of the Libyan Sea
and its rainbow of thunder suffusing the slopes
to Mount Dikti, kindling the rise of golden eagles
and something dark, hidden from time, itself, 

behind the beating of copper shields.
Or I might have been, yet again,
the child caught in the old man’s words,
believing that things are always as they appear.

A Poem by Derek Sheffield

    

  
A Revised Account of the West 

     
They never rode into any sunsets,
didn’t slowly melt themselves
like witches into puddles,
or burst, man and horse fused
in one fell buck, one myth of ash
gone to the sinking mound. 
              
They rode instead toward gaseous
fusion, in the direction of
the photosphere as their shadows
reached back with charred arms, barely
touching the still, pointed boots
aimed crosswise at the edge of town.           
    
They rode away from the doors
of saloons that opened to a twisting
dance of rock and sand
where no bright tunes played
and no feather boa
dangled from a slender neck.          
     
Some minor character
like me, leans against
this here fir tree in the rain,
this second-growth green, and puts it
like this, a side-mouth spit
as the solar wind rips at my hat.
  

   

Online Poems – Robert Bly

  

The Dead Seal
http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?t=46001

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

   
  

  
Poems by Christopher Howell

  
  

Moon Sequence 
           

      I.       
                            
In my hand the moon is a lantern of
blood, unsleeping, or a lantern of whitest
horses blazing over the beaches like a wind.
      
       II.        
                    
In my hair the moon is a dream
of my grandfather unlocking the trunks
of enormous maple trees and stepping into them
as though these lost houses were
his own soul discovered again
after a long time.

         III.
                    
Against my face the moon will never
wake me from this country of slow joy,
though I blink and blink and the dark
corrodes me like a lie.                       

          IV.
               
Wherever it rests and from whatever
persecutions of grace, this moon gem
craving its own light is not what I wanted,
it is only all I wished to sing about
and all I have to bring you, though you
have your own song.                                 
                          
 

Three Leaf-Thoughts for Kuan  

                                                           
     I.         
           
Brilliant Face; the cove of Lu
darkens and teal break
toward the nonexistent
moon.  A singing comes
over the glass water
falling.  O!
it is the leaves
our brethren-in-time! singing
the chant of slow fire.         
            
             
     II.        
             
Today I walked, swishing
gold ruined books
like a god in splendid shoes.
“How is Kuan?” asked the red
voices of squirrels.
And I did not know, having
no letter from that far
province.  So I replied, “he
has in ample stores for winter,
have you?”  And they left me
to leaves and wandering
and orange falling thoughts
of you my friend.              
               
             
     III.
                 
Answer with your next word
old walker, which
of all leaves falls heaviest
into the palms of those
who come with open hands
to the edge of the year?               
                     

(from Though Silence: The Ling Wei Text,
Christopher Howell, Lost Horse Press, 1999)        
 

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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.

Poems by Howard McCord

    (from The Collected Poems)

IN THE FLOWER WORLD

                           a poem for my son

Wyatt leaned against the cliff
of the narrow cwm between
Lost Peak and The Wedge.
The heat had told him
sit in the shade, rest.
I had been in the same spot
fifty years before, and seventeen
as well.
This day
my hip and knees had sent
me back defeated
two hours out.
            
The tumbled cliffs in the Organs
are a kaleidoscope of granite’s possibilities
so full of richness they never
leave my mind.
                 
Wyatt closed his eyes to let the patterns sink
and under the curtain of his lids
heard a cough.
He looked, and heard a deep cough again.
Something stirred in the brush
twenty feet away, a head emerged,
the long dun body
the flicking tail
and Lord of this Cwm, this Mountain
this whole angelic range of beauty
gazed at him with care.
              
Lord Lion stepped noiselessly
along the cliff,
unhurried,
walking in his kingdom.
          
Wyatt’s eyes went with him
into the flower world
the Yaquis tell about.
So rare to visit that a man gone there
is blessed beyond all others.
           
To how many living has Lion shown himself
at twenty feet, in leisure,
without yapping dogs and gunfire
or the sting of tranquilizing dart?
      
This is the rarest visitation
and the deepest kinship
with All
held those moments in the net
of consciousness
forever.

Kathmandu Valley: A Hillside

         
Tibet is fifty miles away
and the requiem of all that is fugitive
is the low and moaning cry of the wind.
The mountains here break out toward the sky
in a spasm of rock and snow
and hungry villages. Below,
a white stupa covers a relic of Buddha
like cupped hands
and I am very close to walking to Tibet.
                   
It is moving into a falcon’s eyes
and brain here on the hillside,
a funny pilgrim rocking on his heels
talking to a brown child
in some tree language of gesture
while out beyond our faces are the Himalayas
and fifty miles away
my cinnamon Tibet.                               

The Rim of the Great Basin
 

     Q. What is the holy power of the wilderness?
     A. The holy power of the wilderness is innocence of man.
           —–The Catechism 

Darkness is another kind of light,
and stones are sweet as air to breathe.
In the depths of canyons
for a thousand years, the unlocked
the rocks themselves and slopped
inside like bones fit into skin.
They watch as the bristlecone
pine signals form the ridge,
and know how flames leap from
flint and steel.
The bighorn desert sheep nests
like a bird above the falling land,
unseen by man, and mountain boomers
play their cylindric minds
on the silences which are wisdom.
Canopus hangs like a breathing eye
in the arms of the pine, and the long
interchange of their awareness
is the heart beating at the core of everything,
a music of smoke and crystal, an impenetrable
language shaped out of time and the graceful,
falling curve of space between them.         

  
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)     

Poems by Paulann Petersen

Appetite
          

Pale gold and crumbling with crust
mottled dark, almost bronze,
pieces of honeycomb lie on a plate.
Flecked with the pale paper
of hive, their hexagonal cells
leak into the deepening pool
of amber. On your lips,
against palate, tooth and tongue,
the viscous sugar squeezes
from its chambers, sears sweetness
into your throat until you chew
pulp and wax from a blue city
of bees. Between your teeth
is the blown flower and the flower’s
seed. Passport pages stamped
and turning. Death’s officious hum.
Both the candle and its anther
of flame. Your own yellow hunger.
Never say you can’t take
this world into your mouth.

Miracle

               
The wonder isn’t that lightning
strikes where it does, but that it doesn’t
strike everywhere. Specifically me.
It isn’t the frequency of car crashes,
but their infrequency. Traffic flicks along
in its speed and perplexity, each move,
each surge a potential disaster.
                
The heart beats out its strange
litany of the enormously possible,
never excluding disease and stricture.
Why does my blood run so easy and warm?
This is the wonder: me approaching
the traffic light just turned yellow,
my foot pressing my trust down
into the brake, the car in agreement
coming steady steady to a stop.

(”Miracle” is from The Bride of
 Narrow Escape, Paulann Petersen)

       
Two Pieces by Paul Roth  

Nothing at All         

We Don’t Belong

(from Words the Interrupted Speak)        
                                                 

          Everything runs from us, hides with eyes fixed on us at all times.  If only we knew the secret to staying unseen and harmless among them.  When we do hide or feign silence, why is it usually in ambush? Our slow bodies employ lures, scents, flies, hatchets, hooks, bullets, arrows, rocks, knives, bolos, spears, slingshots, clubs, boomerangs, nets, traps, pits, and nothing less than our own hands to keep us alive. We don’t realize that everything we kill eats at us until the day we die. We’re not bothered by this huge cage of sky through which helpless birds watch us suffer. We’re even more lost at sea. Fish who swim up to us reveal how much we mean to them without knowing we have no language to address their silence. Buffalo stampeding through Wyoming stop short of their dust in a postage stamp pose of the old west and hold our useless breath in their hot wet mouths. Bathing in this dust and streaked thick with sweat running down our faces, the necessary clay slip-covers our cherished death masks. These masks, hidden from tent to tent and one unknown place on earth to the next may never be unearthed by future wanderers. Great care has been taken never to reveal these masks, never to profess ownership in spite of how overwhelming the value of their power. It’s understood that any revelation might prematurely surface these masks from the bone structure of a wrong face, which is why a mere soot-faced soldier returning from the edge of death in some desert city’s downtown will never find them. It’s not so odd that these are the same ones who think the startled raccoon’s face staring up at them from the dividing line on this road’s fast approaching curve doesn’t deserve to wear them either.

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, sperm
    
and 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
  

Sleeping in the Forest
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Metro/1170/sleepingforest.htm
  

Wild Geese
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Metro/1170/wildgeese.htm
  

Poppies
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~richie/poetry/html/aupoem142.html
  

Little Summer Poem Touching
      the Subject of Faith
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/books/features/19980823.htm
  

           

   

    
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.