The eyes have eyes
The wood has wings

The grounds crew has surrounded     
this spine of earth     
with yellow caution tape 
The wind carries crow cries     
and the sound of plastic tape
                   
The metal top of the sea eagle     
is silken rain     
that goes into ground     
            
                                 
ð

           
The green eyes look over the city
           
This wooden spine watches     
over the four directions     
across the steaming valley 
 
You walk forward     
and step into the past 

A yellow backhoe      
behind a woman with a flag     
isn’t far away       
       
          
ð
       
           
A white Mazda backing up into place     
isn’t the grief look     
in these green eyes
          
A skywalk between modern buildings     
isn’t the height of this ancestral solidness 
           
I hear a woman in this ground scent     
breathing as the pole stops the sky
& stops the ground & holds firs
that hold it steady 
            
From inside the animal claw     
a star of grasses
has started growing at our feet    
                     
               
ð
          
           
Power lifts from earth

of the ten thousand eyes       
eyes of the legs             
eyes of the hawk               
eyes of the ground        
eyes of the branches of thinking          
salmon eyes                  
eyes of the ground bird
of carrying ant eyes          
          
eyes of the wings in grain               
dark-green towering eyes      
eyes in the carved cuts
& smoothed asking         
          
eyes in body & flow of body to body          
dark red morning eyes                 
eyes in plants that grow
without being planted        
eyes in the yellow of blood in a flower             
          
eyes in the underearth           
from which perfect salmon swim          
to where the sun holds
over a single molecule                
eyes in the atoms of open space                 
             
feather that breaks prethinking                    
the way wood looks off                 
far past this stopping        
               
eyes in the fluid progression                
stopping to flow after we’re gone 

Totem from before after we’re gone

Sudden faces of the generations
            shaking Midwest corn in the fields
flew past in West Coast store windows
              & had been in the rain falling
like crow caws on a day of tractoring
            like marmot hair tangled in moss
on gorge rocks, & still the rain falling
            time balanced near an oily exit
the root never far from its flower
            the hydraulics of open sky over corn
factories floating on their oil, with hieroglyphic
            rustling sheet music paperwork
over loading docks, dusk bending
            where a second shift’s working
the ultramagnetic day washing remnants of sleep
            leaving behind soft patches if you walk
on ground, past faces flying in the corn again,
            people yet to be born, as another
spring had entered the way a sparrow
            could be heard suddenly nearby,
singing of the sun & beautiful sparrows. 
                    
Small brown-pink eggs back in the trees
            where a plumb line down to core fire
had been dropped, through trunks
            & thick mother roots, as cricket pulse
in mammalian bones helps make blood
            weather vanes in a mandala Tibetan monks
paint with sand & certain industry, each place
            wheeling a Buddha face centering
gravity in fields impossible to isolate
            the singer in the ‘20s who pried open
earth breathing in its colts
            & floating steel down
in the arms of downtown cranes.  
      
When again the universe sun rose
            over procreative hidden isotopes
we had a regular glow of blood
            & bone the moment before things
passing into next things, & past
            what some do, with soul in the body
body in the light, before anything happens
            future faces alive shuddering wheat  
inside atoms, the ancestral church bells heaped
            in a silo of rusting metal equations, bare
bulbs overhead on wires swaying from wind
            inside a century trampled & bolted down
from a metropolitan clockface eclipse
            ringing the rush, a difficult healing
with people in old chairs & the bulbs
            replaced two for one, the planetary
imperative a floodlight out in the yards
            of night, a hunger raw with the rain
a newly born sky of the next mornings.

Lunch Fractals

rain rings & snaps on the stove pipe

            echoing the sky, down

into the pizza room where we wait

            after the week’s slag & ground swell

that breaks, through turning day on the back

            of night, the call that vanishes, over a February

field as the candle glows, here the radio

            shifting to where this break has gone

the exhaust a carbonic blur slowing

            in breath, as if something could be said

but more has gone before, the guy

            in red running shoes could share

what we ought to do, with the sky

    
what will the Chinese burn in their engines?

            this room has lifted as it waits for others

to enter, the relief from hunger around

            the world, & where did it originate? 

green peppers plant the green, the young

            women vanish, & the father

with two children guides them

            into a blustery afternoon, the new group

of workers places orders in this place

            where orders are taken, this place unmoved

from its hour in ’72, the Who, the pinball anthem

            for those who didn’t know what happened

to what we believed in—it’s playing now

            with posters glowing their imperative

& for me, conjuring that time the Port Clinton Police

            pulled us into the police garage

& they stripped the old Ford

            & reassembled it, as they looked

they said, for drugs, by taking the seats

            out & unbolting the muffler

& what they found was wrapping papers

           from Christmas gifts, & they found

the old fenders & dash from 1955 

            we never called a lawyer

after they let us go, the exhaust fuming

            the motor not abiding to equilibrium

& who gave authority, to search like that?

        
it was better than being clubbed

            in the Park Blocks, by riot police

but they stole my compass

            the concrete cars drive on, the shape

of the human body an imprint

            in breath we share, of our shared form

& bottom line, feet that need

            their footing, this hour here has it

openly, the surfer poster shows

            a man riding overarching waves

of what he intuits but can’t clearly see

            that way of knowing is how we see

part of what does not move very much

            in this wave breaking behind us

this hour here, where we are left behind

            by a long receding wave, where we are

free from the long past forever, almost

            in the center of mind

the Mandelbrot image unfolding

            infinity explored, did you

see it? where on the tiniest cusp

            another image of the whole system bursts

open a force that asks for green peppers

            breathing inside our asking, the motion

of wheels moving, the weight

            that keeps arriving

telling us to be ready

http://earthpoemanthology.wordpress.com/

If you’d like to contribute, you can include writing in a “comment” or email me at jimar@spiritone.com.   Good energy to you.

Iron Mountain          

     by Bill Tremblay        
           
               
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 . . .
                         

          [Please share earth poems in comments or direct
             readers to poems online or to websites or to
             other relevant material.  See the links toward
             the bottom of the right-hand menu, especially
             Dan Raphael's poems in M Review and the link
             to Howard McCord's Collected Poems.]

                                                 One morning,
I woke from a dream where prickly hedges
around a parking lot became the heads of hippos
with ravenous appetites for the heads of people.

These hippos could jump a person, chomp off
the head, then root back into the hedges.

Soon x911 had been called as we stepped out
toward our cars, all the green thickness
circling the lot, the hippos’ fierce hungers
eyeing us.  At my feet was a headless human
we drug back into a room.

Another day, I learned
hippos were just determined
endangered.  The safest place
to be when they were outside
was the fundraising dinner,
where everyone pretended
to be characters from history.

Apple                                                                                   

     The edge of the apple thinks why
     shouldn’t everybody get a bite.

      ›           

     The dark road doesn’t have to go very far,
     speaks up the center of the wheel.

     A blue jay flies between two immense waves.  

     Imprints of ancient ferns 
     shake the imprint of wind.

     When the apple’s eaten, 
     still the apple’s round.

[Newly added: for prose poems, go to Additional Pages for either "Seventeen Prose Poems of Longing" or "Wildnesses."]

      After a Long Struggle

“An Indigo Scent after the Rain” by JG

Suddenly Tonight I Am Listening
        

Tonight the rain enters wood through the roots.
Tonight the light-bodies we become sit down
     in our bodies.
Tonight in their ocean, dolphins and sojourns and maples,
     listening.
Tonight the cinnamon and curry and milk that is asking.
Tonight as low rumblings, as water on dream streets,
     as rain walking in a man or woman leading us.
Tonight amber from oats and rustling harbors of wind,
     and clouds of more world about to form.
Tonight the blue jay back in her nest, and her nest
     in our bones through which the night sky passes.
Tonight a horse breathing behind us, luminous,
     vanishing, as in their mountain, feathers
     are speaking.
A bird’s stratospheres in the centers of air know.
Fire flashes from old camps folded in the stones
     holding mind, trees planting the earth
     between stars as between cells.
Tonight the wood carries rains through the sky
     of its body, into leaves and mind.
As all words form again when any is said.

The Unanswering Will Go Unanswering

A wall that stands there in space.
A noise of a hummingbird’s wings.
Red cliffs back in the foothills
     that read like inside chanting.
The mastodon sides and flanks
     and faces of some rocks.
A different red in the skin of peaches,
     a purple at the edges of a place with no buildings.
And wings that hear us with our spines,
     light that flows from inside the galaxy.
A green fire from the seed reaching into its hope.
A wall as sun comes down around it,
     and through it, to its home.
A wall with rain forest grown up around it.
A surge in the arms of someone who holds you.
The new blueberries, squirrels, mushroom,
     or wooden table.
A quick city and long nights of the sky.
A hornet flying some of the meat away.

Rooms Lit from the Reaches

Bless the surge in spools of urgency,
citrus in the mouth of a kiss, silicone
of research, sister of the cool alfalfa.  

Take the electricity into cities of cells,
and ring the wood, wrap lives within lives
as you have done, wisdom before thinking.  

Bless the generals with specifics reached
by their overview, shieldbug on the screen,
footprint from the ant, lamp lit by water
in a river, table solid from its lost leaves.  

Bless the strong arms of laws lanterned
by mushrooms in culverts of the fallen
unheard-of logs where ferns lift slightly
all conditions, even downtown in the hotel.  

Bless the primordial screak of metal warped down,
rust of given blood, spores that puff through
air with microscopic galaxies’ blue hum.  

                   ›  

Bless the egg with a salmon swimming to leave it.
Bless the question with rain cupped in the root-curved
asking, where the possum grubbed in violets,
where the green fly woke like uranium,
in the reaches, bless us, mother of the sun.  

Bless the shrine with a roof over the man’s head,
and bless the tank in emergency shelters,
and take us back, orange-throated robin’s call,
inside us, torch-lit caves inside us.  

Father of ground, hone our root steps.
Reddening apples, bless the roundness,
mother of space, whose long hair is sound,
whose letting go holds, mother of the sun.

All This Is Modified

All this is modified by the trains
     and the lightness of hair.

It is modified by flute music
     in the Peruvian mountain town.

It is a canyon breathing with grain,
     as a new hive swirls on the edge. 

It is rocked by sparrows, by leaf masks
     and forest lungs, and blue sky in the sky.

It is turned with old glass doorknobs
     and a nuclear war that didn’t happen.

And inside the body, inside the bread,
     huge sunflowers bow, luminous, in August.

All this is modified by the falling
     center of the falling world of an apple.

And the wild curry reaches an unborn doctor,
     with African metal bells shaking infinity.

And whatever is privately owned
     is also owned by the afternoon rain.

And the kiss on the infant’s belly
     returns to him many years later.

A Spark That Keeps Flying

When a blue jay breathes, a spark flies
     into a mustardy lichen hollow,
    and another into a salmonberry’s knuckle
     and into a seed of long buffalo moss
     and another into a cliffrose.
                   
When a blue jay breathes on a moss-haired
     limb behind the falls, maple leaves glow,
     resonating, with late afternoon in August.
                      
When a blue jay breathes, a crow near
     the resinous top of a Sitka Spruce full of sparks
     breathes, over hundreds of uncoiling ferns in each run
     the ground makes, the river gorge towering
     over small parked cars by the lodge, and dark-red
     and black bark beetles scrambling
     along the moment they can’t be seen.
                       
When a blue jay breathes, the ferns reach into clear
     daylight and hold their shaded greens on the edge
     of a spectrum mostly invisible, though prisming
     at the rims of water and wet eyes and juice
     on thick cedar bark.
                   
And the roots and dense channels of soil spark
     with electrical veins in the living ground, lit
     from their cells, where sun and shape
     are crackling, pulsing, from inside the sound
     of fir needles breathing in waves for miles and miles.
                         
When a blue jay breathes, a spark flies into me.  
    It is still flying when I lie down in bed
    beside Marilyn, whom I love.

Some Transmutation of Desire:  
     A Momentum
      

A momentum before acting.
A lamp before light is invented.
A cosmic bee hive exhaling a peach tree
     and the yarrow in wind near a mushroom.
A tongue lapping the mystical thinness
     and how the lettuce is touched.
An Andean rocking of pre-Columbian pelvics
     and parachute of bread scent
     floating the kitchen down.
A saying of rain-falling wheat.
A Texas of the pilgrims backing up to the flower
     and car engines with licheny myelophonic replies.
A country plowed up by radio philosophy.
A color in the hair the curve of mahogany.
A girlfriend of the Pope’s earthiness
     near a distant Tibetan damp-tongued dark.
A slender bus station held up invisibly.
A light caught in the brain of weight
     funded by the brain of light.
A Stream Violet with a real altitude.
A saying following its foreign-based shouts
     and nearby banked-on skin lotions
     educated very much into one of the days.
An act before motion and weight.
A premium caught in the ocean’s intimate drain
     of grandfather’s fattened sunflower.
A rain seen in a moment.
A conscious nakedness of celery.
An almond shaded in its morning shapes
     and African tusk mask behind museum glass
     of an assumed solidness.
A surge through the cardinal cinnamon.
A chamomile as it steps down
     into the candlelit water.

Onion
       

 So the day wraps around the earth,
          and night wraps around its day,
          and distance wraps around the mind
          and its tiniest thing.

  So the months stand up around us,
          flaming in fuels
          of the vegetables,
          in a eucalyptus grove,
          in the scent of rain.

  So walls cover the light of sleep,
          and a breath covers the trees
          in our chests, and day wraps
          around with its oceans.

  So winds cover their ground,
          and roads uproot the villages,
          and events recover our lives,
          and blue jays appear and vanish,
          and the soup lifts into its warmth
          and is taken.

All This Is Intensified                      
                           

All this is intensified by a librarian’s voice
in a town we never got to, and by a boy’s desire.
It is fired by a heat from the ground under Iceland,
a loss of dignity back in 7th grade gym class,
fueled by winds rushing through recent harsh
     letters
as through pinecones, the wave of an asking answer,
perhaps teenagers going to war, hair falling
     onto shoulders,
the nearby blue jays calling out, the room fed
     by root winds.
                                            
It keeps flying on a wheel that isn’t necessarily
     present,
with satellite laser cartography intensified by a price
paid to employers, by the loss of an elder
to reclusive comfort, by the beauty of ocean stones.

All this is intensified by a flowered skirt,
     by earth
scent from the side yard, behind translations
of ancient Kabir in a modern city, the thunk
of solid wood near blistering numbers of tickets,
fired by a future impossible to imagine, by
     mahogany
of the ethereal cello, in the forest where flickers
     breathe.

Sun Bears Its Full Space Open with Sense
      
          
Sun bears its full space open with space.
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 snow-greased bearings 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 sky and light in
     the mind.
It is the engine of the pinecone and savior blood cell
     working.
It is the way squirrel hair slightly glows in afternoon
     shade.
It rains on the rocks and boils in the ocean bay.

Light Enters the Room

An older woman in a yellow plastic raincoat
hurries north, her arms loaded with notebooks,
as world flags drape down a beam. 
The man whose accent is Estonian
hauls the iron gate down to the floor,
closing off the café, Friday late afternoon
lifting its Fahrenheit in people’s voices,
even if they’ve recently read international news.

The worker looks at his wrist and pushes a hand
into his pocket, the skylight dampening
the banquet tables with light.  Or the room’s
smoky with overhead glow, the building
now a longhouse going forward and forward.  

It’s okay to be here, to sit here, even
if we haven’t heard the languages
streaming colors above us, blood-red in many. 
A Buddha wheel sits in the central white
stripe of one, bordered by raw green,
someone crying out behind us, playing.  

Will he know what to do ten years from now? 
Will this place let us live?  Trying is high up
now, near the top of this room, where skylight
floods full spectrum as if it were longing
for a city of people and trees to join it.
A few new names wait for us inside us.  

We will work in unknown times soon enough,
outside the years, the pollen blown from
its tassels, when how we move
is linked to ways we learn
what enters the day is transformed. 

                             “Piano of the Sun and Moon” by JG

[apologies for the advertising superimposed on this, if you got them using a Google search--unsure why it is doing that but will get it to stop]

                          Late  

How do you face the fall of ice

as we know it, the end of a white bear,

those scrawny and starving gray whales,

the shrinking swarms of plankton with gulleted

bugling elephant great heart of continents

shot point blank, as the cooking heat sinks south

& drains north, scouring rains, the piped-up

& blasted ancient sunlight melting ancient ice? 

How do you mourn fire we can’t measure

in finches’ wings, the dried-out late forest

California tinder flash, sun burning its planets

around its circling, its geo-positional violet

landings through binoculars in a wild fly’s eyes,

its green-harvested hazelnut in the squirrel’s

warm mouth, & those millions migrating

from drowned cities on oceanic coasts

of matter, when we’re going to be gone

or still here?