Belly Brain~for Greg Sarris

Some say if you you adopt a sitting place in nature / say by a creek / and visit it regularly / alone and in silence  

A first note may be offered to you / on any random inhalation  
( easily missed )
The re-routed red signalling of rock and moving water store the ancestral Holdings of the spot
Some say songs are embedded there for preservation / bestowed on a few
And only the most patient listeners of voices once eroded and damned.  Now Testifying.
Revealing a * "storied landscape.''

Some say that chapters are held in layers of soil
Parables buried in sand silt and clay
Indigenous memory ( when we were all indigenous )
Of story-song that comes from the intrinsic 
Inclusiveness of the "particular place" / the "every place" in all directions.

Some say our deep listening will act like a fertile Delta of reclamation
Present like the presence that redeems it's past / the future that sees itself  Unborn
The thrum of live elemental tapestries
Knotted to the well-being of individual~ family~ tribe.

 * "storied landscape": a term used by Greg Sarris, Chief of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria in response to my inquiry about an area of Miwok land in West Marin.

dirt weather (terra gaudium)

tickle the roots

shoestring massive

how can the walker relate to the toedeep rooted

treefolk whose span is mirrored

at the deep top of earth?

stretching to the sky of dirt

inverted persevering

worm clouds, slug rain

tempests of fungal alliance

let’s steady this earth climate

that girds us firmly in terra gaudium

The Hazards of Diving

I know a man who dives for abalone.
He tells me of its hazards,
how it's possible to dive too deep,
remain too long in the seductive dark
like a gambler who can't break
from the spinning roulette wheel
because he feels too lucky.
Depleted of oxygen, a diver's brain
might mistake up for down, down for up
and with impaired judgement come to distrust
his own exhaled bubbles' ascension
and choose rather to swim down
in search of mermaids
like the poor fool who tosses
his life savings on the gambling table
in order to win back his Lexus.
Those few who've survived
affirm the ecstacy
of confusing down for up
loss for gain
dark for light
the mermaid's embrace.

In Tide

A day

when the wave

broke beneath the fog

& when staying aboard meant

sunlight felt (close to shore)

& golden hills seen adrift in cloud

& salt the taste on skin & tongue.

Up was moving fast past

Down was moving wet ahead

In between me & my board

licking both

in tide out tide

inside outside

up to down from

foam into blue on white

curled together,

toes grip wood & eyes wide open

hands spread wide

signal safe at last...

Prompt: Down/Up

Say... which way IS up, anyway?
The earth holds us while we dangle down into infinite space.
The earth is our heaven, while space is cold and lonely as the Biblical vision of Hell, a place assumed to be "down."
When we "ascend" after death, we actually move "up" into earth by about six feet...
Or is north "up" and south "down"? Or the other way around?

Sense spherical directionality with a fresh perspective, and write about what you discover.

keywords: poem, your handle downup, epic-earth

An ongoing series of earth-related prompts as part of an Imunuri experiment to dwell repeatedly on a theme and its riffs, and/or the possible poetry challenge, bit by bit, of producing an epic or body of poems...