So it’s the next day and we’re still alive on the planet where we’ve thrived beyond overflow capacity and immersed ourselves in collective interdependence propped up by long-evolved mineral sense and other species.
With all the fasting and ascension, retooling of Arctic winds for the hog-blinking duration, through certain rains we’ve inherited, amounts of arrogance from before science occur in the underbelly of thought.
And yet this is the chance we were given, to live while the clock hands wheel and numbers vanish along with the sky eventually darkening, where heads of the sunflowers eventually bend heavily toward the ground, as if sizing up where their seeds will fall.
Unfinished presence extends, where mushrooms stake out reclamations.
Stitches Grandma made to dresses on her seamstress bodices I’m sure still exist where they were drawn with attention taut, right for the baby in arms of her mother, in the room behind the door that stays closed.
James Grabill’s recent work is online at the Caliban, Green Mountains Review, Kentucky Review, Elohi Gadugi, Buddhist Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Terrain, Mobius, Calliope, The Oxonian Review, The Toronto Quarterly, Mad Hatter’s Review, Plumwood Mountain, and others. His books include Poem Rising Out of the Earth (1994) and An Indigo Scent after the Rain (2003), both from Lynx House Press. Wordcraft of Oregon has published his new project of environmental prose poems, Sea-Level Nerve: Book One and Book Two. A long-time Oregon resident, he teaches 'systems thinking' and global issues relative to sustainability.
