James Grabill

Everyone Sleeping Root heat heart presses on, taking black steps into the sky. Pitch thrusts against the docks, as money’s buried under the sea. Rolling electrical down-stepped avenues ask for drunkenness and for temperance, for symbiotic presence within the largest. So the smallest breathe in sync, mapping the size of the body with their lightning-stung sense already streaming along meridians. Grounding takes thought, and leaves it behind as evening pulls up in its shimmying truck. The sun’s entangled pulse distills and ferments in smoke-green shaded breath. Main characters wanting to speak may hear. A ghost eye may finally close in molecular countlessness. Darkness off the road doesn’t mean we’ll be losing the place which was empty then filled. Little Time Passes Corn under the sun in the summer doctored by bees carries their torch where fractals turn as the planet spins. Case studies piled on old hotel tables darken until boxed and carried off, then appear decades later in glass hallways where lenses extending perception are being refined. A late ‘60s Beatles album resounds in the front room through all that has happened, the way sun falls in the rain. Ground gives off purple skirts, yellow apples, and Tibetan rings, as canopied rain forests sway. The small meeting in the mid-‘70s in which Very Venerable Kalu Rinpoche noted, It is very rare for a being to take human form, was a few hours ago. Sun arrives in green beans, pasta, and raspberries, in feathers and paper, where we might be pushing 64 though little time has passed. Moss grows over the unused steps into multiple spreads of plants in a seed. Prismatic readings of fortune fly from ferns in fractal cross-hatchings of classical realism. James Grabill’s poems have appeared in numerous periodicals such as Harvard Review, Shenandoah, Stand (UK), The Oxonian Review (UK), Magma (UK), New York Quarterly, South Dakota Review, Ur Vox, Re Dactions, The Bitter Oleander, Urthona (UK), East West Journal, Willow Springs, kayak, Caliban, The Common Review, and others. His books of poems include Poem Rising Out of the Earth and Standing Up in Someone (Oregon Book Award winner, 1995) and An Indigo Scent after the Rain (Lynx House Press, 2003). He lives in Oregon, where he has taught writing, literature (Shakespeare, the Beats), and 'systems thinking' relative to sustainability.