James Grabill CINNAMON There’s a first charge, integrity in midst of flux, imperative our consistency demands, bottom-line interconnection where nobody wins except those with regard, and throwing huge timber at the Scottish games in the middle of strength, the strong men lose, except for regard at this juncture of the moon and planet and person and soul and rock and roll and ocean gull and front window drift into asking, ancestors’ voices counting, back in shadows of barricades, backseat sway of vehicular thunders hovering over a planted seed. And we have been made by stone that lifts where it fell, by the taste of cinnamon solidness gives to us, by the numbers washed over by zeros, the timber poised at the gate of forgetting, the earthworms reaching out of the ground in the night. We have been made by northern lights igniting nearby color, by the clouded morning rock reuses, by dust in the air of a billion, and sense that however we ended up with it we have, the animals sent in to rescue us from mediocrity and perfection, the stock market at the edge of untouchable jewel, bread of the wind inside our cells, an enspiced heat of vision, each breath having arrived, what might have been rocking renewed, by red-brown warmth that helps us realize this is the place. Copyright © 2004 by James Grabill. All rights reserved.