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James Grabill |
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 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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Straight Coffee
Are they still with us, those whose swords
halved whole bodies, those whose blankets softened
the winter, those with faces carved in rock
back at the waterfall of decades through the Milky
galaxy with massive infinitesimal infinity?
Names for the sun are carved solemnity, a roadside
with pollen showering a billion times a billion times.
Guitars riff overhead, down through what we’re
breathing,
strumming the talkers waiting heavily, the coffee line
near screeching milk steam, the big grin of a four year
old
with his mother it looks like, a cup of warm chai tea
carried
to another table, the conversation opening its ‘50s band
shells,
its satellite dishes, as potatoes lift out of the ground
somewhere
and become rocky hills. Now subatomic guitars shudder
downstream from 1990, the hound running in 1976, the
marchers
in Washington in 1969 passing by Lincoln, people with
four-hour
candles, sleeping in church basement sanctuaries, the
Ford in 1955
on two-lane roads, hotels towering over a green pea. The
oak table lifts
through the void into meaning. Bookshelves rise up from
their floor
into starlight, the green day inhaling old studies in
Germany.
Over woven trans-continental rugs of many colors, the
table’s a harbor,
the solidness in flux, a vibratory forest sense in
polished clarity
for the swirling mud-mind, mute firs all the time
speaking
of rain, who gave themselves to God and slung home
slaves,
who took off with dancers igniting the joints, steadfast
employees
with classical ambition, at this station of why we’re
here.
Circulation
With the minute hand gone, the highway roar held moving
weight.
Alone, a blue neon trailer truck backed into its uranium
company cove.
Under the headwinds shaking giant cedars and in the air
near a small person,
a lightning almost not visible had its dust falling,
reminding what is steady
how it is leaving. Pine needles carpeted the Beatles
song drenching the hour,
rotating a solar spit on which part of our living work
had been placed.
Lineage draped down from neighborhood wires. The white
wall insinuated
its museum. Slides of slippery wholeness guarded the
garden seeds
as case studies piled up their running car engines on a
front balcony.
Work broke, and late night storefronts held back what
had not been made.
The unknown rolled its flat pastures through the strain
of absent employment.
Trees, deciduous and conifer, plants with wooden stems
and green stems,
had become part of a person’s circulation, the waves at
the coast, part
of a person’s breathing, way back, before thinking, at
the time of breathing.
Awake at Night
What we might have halfway seen, what we memorized
by heart, we return to sleep so soon you’d think that
sleep
could be calling us back home. You’d think the world
could be inside this story here, remembering our luck
out of chaos-flux, our rhythms we inherit, our lost old
shadows
of ancestral bones of the face, of the forearm and
pelvis,
now showing through with hair of the squirrel, bite of
the lobe,
box of the collar, bark in the midnight, dark in the
slow green,
lip of the long light, fern down through breaking bank,
hold
through the rowing search, the lizard bee, tongue flower
loop,
pulsatile animal warp all wrecked in binding down shape
in afternoon, then evening weight. It must be that
someone
knows or has known, or is going to will herself to know
through cracking wind to ask, a compass braced by
voices,
by smooth arms, embraced, through drape of steam, new
reddened grace, liberties agreed upon, the night sky
itself?
The call, down in single grape, the seed in purple
round,
the charged ignited fold of gravity, scent of a loved
neck,
key cut from apples shaped by empty call, held close
to sternum, soft, bowl round through the hour’s fill,
more than anyone remembers, the earth saying this
through crickets, pulsing through currents and rocking
us.
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