50 Steps to Thicket

There stirs an edge where bindings,

something so innocuous, falter

that the relief of stepping beyond

surprises and stuns in the gentling

The living cascading with every

open space, wallow, and weft

nothing here confines, demarcates

except where hand has led

What something has brought me 

to this place, the thicket,

measure as I will at times 

the distance that now dissolves

Tremulous whatever that was

that stalled and pressed so

firm as hardened heart

neatly savaging my own wild

It is as if I have traveled 100

miles to arrive at this place

(not just 50 and counting steps)

and in no time bowering down

This less than tangle more than

epiphany surmounts the ease 

of every confounded convenience

siphoning us to slumber in our ways

 

Moving Parts

Someone welds a pipe on a metal stand

between a highway and a granite cliff.

Pull over and put your eye to the end

of the pipe. There. Can’t you see the profile

of Perry Mason? His eye, the square chin?

Years pass as life on earth and your own life

move you into the digital city.

Here any pipe you looked through would be filled

with straight edges, themselves celebrities.

So you start to keep rectangles on hand,

small totems of faces and vertices—

everyone has at least one, like passwords.

Everyone grows to have many, like teeth.

I climbed Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower

so my pulse testifies that the land lifts,

and from this view, the low parts look like swords

raised by a phalanx issuing a roar.

mount tabor (a land curve poem)

CALDERA

the wisdom seeds held in 

geotechnical kernels until a

future plume of humanatural blossoming

can funnel the explosions of creative

dense symbolic unfurling like biocultural

popcorn and maybe our future kin and their

mutualized animal plant fungal allies can remember

patterns of connection (kin-action) to thrive in copresencing

delight

the fire at the belly of the mountain a taproot to earth

being earth

Winter stories about my mother

//My 78 year old mother is a heavy set, anxious woman
With a propensity for head spins and passing out in crowds//

~~ Picture her voluptuous ~ rolling ~ undulating form as she falls>~~

" Don't worry!!!!  + Fainting on public transit* is just my blood sugar's way of getting my attention...and I  get to meet the all the good folks who come to my rescue!"
  
On one of my Winter visits, she befriends a stranger on a bus

I witness her over-heating and over-empathizing ways
A bad news magnetism that solicits his lament 
As they stand shoulder to shoulder rocking back and forth with the horde
Her eyes slowly beginning to dissociate as the intensity of his story mounts
Beneath an unbelievably tight girdle~bra and under layers of full winter garb
Her body begins to swell with heat and contract with resistance

Later she feels dizzy and we sit on a bench in the snow

She tells me about her Father. 

~He's been dead for 40 years//nevertheless// she still takes his bad advice##
~Being a man of his times ;;; he was certain that every good woman should:::
~Strap her soft and bulging parts into a proper restraining garment.
  
~Those who did not do so thoroughly disgusted him ~

    there's nothing I can say...
 

Later that season on a usual morning after absentmindedly eating half a pear...

she puts on her gear and delves into the fast moving river of the crowd 

outside the safe isolation of her apartment ;;;; the pear being just enough to jack up her blood sugar ;;;; sending it spiking and then ( at the typically bad time )  crashing///// just a she is ascending the mall escalator == Her body giving into the dizzy spell as her lungs are barely expanding against the formidable resistance of her D cup brazier>><<The backward falling of her hefty mass is broken by  three unfortunate strangers who she will later refer to as her angelic saviors ~~~ she feels her body cradled and it pleases her ^^^ She takes refuge in the strength of their arms when they huddle around her and yell "Call 911!" as they remove the taut fabric of her skirt from the sandwiching pull of metal while the moving staircase delivers them to the top floor where there are more angels who again cry out "911!"   One of them holds her head ))) another takes her hand ((( She gives them permission to unbutton her coat +unhook her bra+///  She feels the rise and fall of her chest}}} 

Bulges  sagging  unharnessed ~~~ everything at ease.+

 

note: after writing this poem i felt very dizzy and had to lay on the floor with my head on my dog's belly

Prompt: Land Curve

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...

The contour of earth can resemble a part of the human form. A craggy shnoz in your local mountain range? The sleeping earth in hillscape? Respond creatively to some site where the local landscape seems as if the earth itself is taking human form. A possible riff: Write from the point of view of this landcurve, and/or include a photograph or drawing.


Tags: landcurve, poem, your-moniker, epic-earth



Image credit: Purportedly Zeus in Mount Yiouktas in Heraklion, Crete, photo by Pavaan Solanki,  from Ten incredible faces in the rock

 
Other examples: 
http://www.goddessalive.co.uk/issue19/sleeping_beauty.html
Human influenced: http://naturalworldfoto.blogspot.com/2009/03/anywhere-smile.html