Animal Sync

Each place we’ve taken in
we’re looking from,
as through purple-black eyes
of grackles or multiples
of off-split sumacs of the whole

arterial crimson branching spreads
through the meeting chambers
open to anyone who’s never seen

pronghorn antelope racing across
foothills as to anyone who never
has stopped to ponder photographs
of the Sombrero galaxy or Messier 104
taken from the Hubble orbiting

each cell watching from the mind
of its own, from before symbiosis grew

into a spread-wing lichen moth
for anyone entering the emergency
room stalls where they’d be falling
into a range of personal transience

as cross-sectioned as these hours
arriving from abstract First Avenue
are being painted expressionistic
by infinity all night as the truly old

goats of white ice have a go
along throat-edges of the next

hand-cut diamonds melting
one week, then Great Lakes
wall-eyed pickerel flying off
to Canadian waters the next,

given the build-up of summer
in lower regions of heating
and following one’s only social
responsibilities of thirst, hunger,
shelter, desire, giving to what was
known once to be straight-ahead
organic truth over the unraked

months of plankton-eating
that reach us each moment
a hydromedusa jellyfish, lit
from within like a Pacific city,
parachutes through the whole

ancient carnival in the subliminal
homes and symmetry of eyes
the intelligence of the cells has
employed, in accord with its own

longer-term primordial hatchings
and rarest of mammalian births.









James Grabill has had four volumes of his poems published by Lynx House Press, including Poem Rising Out of the Earth and Standing Up in Someone. Since the early '70s, his poems have appeared in literary periodicals such as kayak, Field, Poetry Northwest, New Letters, Poetry East, The New York Quarterly, The Harvard Review, Ur Vox, Caliban, South Dakota Review, The Bitter Oleander, The Common Review, The Prose Poem, Poet Lore, Cimarron Review, and Willow Springs. He teaches writing (technical writing and creative writing), literature (Beat Lit, Shakespeare, creative nonfiction), and sustainability.