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James Grabill
Poetry from Volume 4 Issue 2
Sun Bears Its Full Space Open With Sense
Sun bears its full space open with sense.
Sun lumbers and showers with rain into arms of cottonwoods.
Sun kindles space it brings to life down the first road.
Sun burns its passion on the avenue of no-wishes.
Sun sees down to the worm's glide eating blind.
Sun gives up brick ruins to the cricket near a window.
Sun serves smoldering blue sky even through streetlight.
Sun wolf-dusts the moss with glistening atmosphere.
Sun holds the stone particles filling the fall oak steady.
Sun wheels the falling snow through ant colonies of core knowledge.
Sun plows the soggy fruit of open space faced with letting go.
Sun rocks the forgotten chestnut in the oil-steam of yes-no.
Sun closes down the strings filled with red-white coals.
Sun blossoms inside out in itself to get here inside journey.
It is the head of the body of earth-molecules designed from inside.
It is the core of earth and center of the sky and light in the mind.
It is the engine of the pinecone and savior blood cell working.
It explodes the curves open and the sudden fungus horns on firs there.
It bursts and swells and intricately fuels around all November.
It is the way squirrel hair slightly glows in the afternoon shade.
It hits ferns in the dusk becoming white-violet sea gulls at once.
It rains on the rocks and boils in the ocean bay of joy and sadness.
A Certain Edge
Behind the house, a raccoon
scrambles onto the old wooden fence
we kept solid and made plumb
between this world and the next.
Everywhere the next world takes apart
what we bring, however slowly,
and surely what forms as a result
is some kind of answer?
The round sky of rains
revolves in the midst.
The western ocean sends its storm.
Where the wheel doesn't point,
there's the shadowy truck flying home
and the barking of a dog
for what is walking past
nearly unnoticed in history.
And still there— wooden houses
near the beach where many wish
they could return and find
they don't have to go farther,
and still here, this sense my father
is with us, and ache arcing
around the curve of the planet.
I don't know how to spell the words
where he is and do not understand
the presence of conscious resonance
we experience where he isn't
but some of us still sense him.
From the Rocking
Forget, forget, forget the thousand commands
and swale of the breech through trunk fog, the sigh
long-down, beneath clicks of gullets and purrs,
those dog-blasting hair-flown vegetable beefs,tanked and riverous, in thy members of transient
flowering, thy soft fingering of number nineteen,
forget back into the rule of hours collected,
those snowfalls piled in the raindrop, the houses
banked into the lean of flat form, the thousand
commands in a question, curling the churning coil
and bastioned anchorly, festooned and fish-shaped,
conjoined through waves of undersea scenes sinking
through where it starts to be forming, where it starts,
here where it is stunning, bewildered, ghost-tinged
and flashed forward like table forks seen for beauty:
so much converges, we work to forget, the collectives
channeled in spite of theology, the risks and cares
the new brains grow, the grooves and digging of horns
to heave and hothouse our slow cusp, the candling sky,
rocking planet, cradle of space, with forearms, feasts,
the restives embalanced, forgetting, forgetting today
only a floating scent that passage of time might measure,
to be here, so suddenly this stand in loosening
the cool manufactured in the stays of natural stone.
James Grabill, Portland, Oregon. His collection, Poem Rising Out of the Earth and Standing Up in Someone received the Oregon Book Award for Poetry in 1995. Holy Cow! Press published a collection of his personal essays, prose poems and poems in1995— Through the Green Fire. His recent Lynx House book is titled Listening to the Leaves Form and continues his exploration of associative imagery, interconnection and symbolism. He writes, "Hope the poems share a sense of the only hour, of the imperative and layers..."
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