All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Ithuriel's Spears, Fiesta Flowers, Wild Hyacinth

Open music in a new window.

RUNNING WITH MY POWER

I hike where even the humus breathes slightly,
huge trees exhaling a breath that cleanses
the darkened shrubs of my lungs
and awakens flowers of energy

all over my body. I feel
the drumming deep in roots and rocks
as snowmelt cascades down the slopes,
the blood of other creatures pounding

in my ears, coursing through countless
veins, the heartbeat of mother earth pulsing
in bushes and trees, in the bobcat
across the stream, in the strider

sliding away from the bank
on a skin of light. There I find
my power, releasing black spiders
from my subtle body through a hole

in my back, healing myself through grief
and forgiveness, cleansing
the astral flowers of my aura
until they open for the powers

of harmony. Together, my power
and I strut through a meadow
to the ruins of a stone house
as coyotes cut loose a howl,

and we dash over hills on ancient trails
from pounding stone to pounding stone,
feeling our way through a cave where I see
brilliant archetypes: a pure, white,

four-petaled flower burgeoning
into a flower with countless petals,
the four elements blossoming into
the thousand-petaled lotus; a gray

figure eight, floating above my head;
and a golden-equal armed cross, the Archangels
at each end slowly growing clearer.
I emerge from the cave to perform

a ritual invoking the Archangels,
the four elements flowing into me
so that I feel the power of those forces
embodied as human forms

with mighty wings, all a flowing,
a balancing, as I lounge
on a pounding stone at the edge
of the cliff and pray for release

from attachment and desire. I am
a hawk floating high
above the oaks, my body towering
into the heavens, assuming the form

of a god, my own head the fiery head
of a hawk, my aura flung beyond the edges
of the solar system, the sun beating down,
manifold creatures in its light whispering

to me. Seven pestles wait, placed
on a rock near the pounding stone.
Once I was certain the Earth
would be free of us,

everything that I and so many others
had fought for in ruins--but now
I stand on the pounding stone
under the living sun, awakening

the Tree of Life within myself
as I make a brilliant cross of light,
a wren foraging a few feet away,
huge astral antlers branching

from my head, an inverted rainbow
in my heart, a flock of bushtits
descending on an oak, so close: I am
now no more threatening than the sun.

 All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Ithuriel's Spears, Fiesta Flowers, Fiddleneck

Open music in a new window.

THIRTY PERCENT

RAISE IN RENT

Phantom jets scrape the roof. Slow
thunder unravels the air
down to the pig-colored walls.
Bubbles bob, thin cities of light, evade
his frenzied hands and slide
through a mirrored window
where images of the courtyard curve
repeatedly upward, one and multiple.
In the corner, a dented cart,
a philodendron jungle, and a mattress
smeared with yellow dust.
He climbs into the cart,
hanging on a pane where bubbles slid
through, the fading circles
unbroken, his palms, fingertips, and nose
pressed to the glass. Bug-littered,
celestial porchlights switch on.

He wizens a plum with budding teeth
in a clinker of fallen gingko leaves.
He was told about the invisible,
how it lives like air and squeezes
like smoke, how it resides
in his teeth and falls in his hair,
its hour like breath,
how it grows from earth and fire,
providing each table
with light and with water
as cold as winter rain.

__________

Shadows feel through the window
past reflected branches swaying
before his face in the glass. His eyes
follow tiny blackened stars of blood

on the concrete. He pulls his salvaged
wagon out to where the valuables wait--
a mirror, houseplants, stuffed animals,
a stray hand--and stares, timeless, at himself,

the journey already beginning, the dirt
peeling away from the street
as if the cells of everything
were sloughing off into the wind.

Everyone is moving. Back rent unpardonable.
No one allowed to squat on the lawn. No one
allowed to run around. A new owner, a new
manager, and a thirty percent raise in rent.

The old woman who had pinned his Nina, Pinta
and Santa Maria to her frig with a strawberry
magnet might steer a shopping cart
out the door, and he could curl up

below the carriage, dragging the cart
forward like a turtle, his shell heavier and heavier
as they trek down the alley. He goes back inside
and curls, legs up, on his bed, then ferries a Matchbox

ambulance in a stray sandal to bundles of wash,
the Canary Islands. Through the window, he sees
a bus lurching forward, floating into a cross-street
two lights away, vanishing downtown....

__________

Settling into seventy five, he glanced at almond orchards,
the rows between evenly spaced trees slanting south,
south-east, or east as his eyes shifted focus. The trunks
of the nearest trees floated, the orchard dropping to earth

exactly as his car passed, like a net falling short of him.
Another dry river. A night heron, crooked thumb, jutted
from a branch in the river bed. He thought of loose hands,
worn out, single gloves plucked from melon boxes

and clothes-pinned to the conveyor. The case sealer
crushed slow hands that struggled to pull jammed
boxes clear. Anorexia's calm fingers inserted coins
into the slot, pressed a button, and scooped up

a soda, just before she turned, slid boxes
to one side, and rested a .45 against her husband's head,
a hand splattered with mud as it slapped
the gun away. Her husband had abandoned her near

town, and she'd trudged twenty miles through the fields
to the compound. They used to bet about who would kill
whom at the "Okie Flat" packing shed. Frank once smoked
after the conveyor broke down again while others loaded

by hand--wasn't in his job description. Frank was found
dead in a car by the road, dents in his skull the size
of a police baton, the case "inconclusive." Steve murdered
Anorexia, cutting her up like a grape stalk and burying her

in his big red toolbox. They silently suspected something
was wrong when he hadn't shown for work on Sunday--
time and a half. Nor would Fifi do the shuffle for the ladies
while waiting his turn to shower in that outhouse

with a shower nozzle. Fifi had been released
from the "vocational institute" until he was beaten
and raped repeatedly. Driving by the last gas station
for miles, he imagined the land without people, the canals

almost empty, the floodplain of five rivers in wet years
extending from the mountains to north of Tulare,
subsiding into networks of marshes and shallow lakes,
webbed by teeming sloughs and channels, a refuge

from dunes and alkali sinks for birds along the flyway.
Once, while he pissed, so drunk he could hardly stand,
he teetered above the body of a great blue heron,
its neck a question mark, the wings extended

in the dirt. He was done as an activist after losing
his job at the big box store for chewing gum
and for not coming in on his days off--he knew it
as he neared houses of cardboard thrown together,

just as he recalled again the ash tree
in the compound, a tree dreamed
in childhood that revealed a fate no one
wanted to believe, the trunks

of loaded fruit trees blending
into one as the sun raced
on the horizon, the last light logged
on the walls of the shed.

 All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Tiger Lilies (before the Creek Fire)

Open music in a new window.

PATHS THAT AWAKEN: 

MOVING AWAY

He refuses to clean the bedroom
in the mirror and bats at motes
swimming in an aquarium
of sunlight. Stitches closed
the tunnel between his nose and mouth
and cinched his cleft lip, which had gaped
at the horn of gum blanketed
and rose-tinged by the sloping
pillar of nostril. In a forest
of toys, the mirror world,
a beast bursts from a human
womb, snout whimpering, tail
flailing as it bangs
into the witnessing denizens.
In this nightmare story (overheard
at a picnic) the doctor
stares at claw marks
in his chest while the beast
dies from tranquillizers, still
attempting to scurry away.

But when he was born, his body slowly slipped
from the flesh that clothed him, his eyes opening
to the glare in tile and instrument and mirror.
The nurse took prints of feet and thumb
and handed him to his mother,
who wept, hearing the words harelip
and cleft palate, as he lay, clear and firm,
in her arms.

He slurs that he loses his elbow
just like he loses his lap--
as one loses a world. The neighbors
have moved, emptying their rooms,
taking his little friend with them.
Someone else must screech
and drum the floor with dancing feet.
He stands within the bare walls
and stares at the prospects
of all he loves, the magnolias
dropping shreds of purple paper,
faces without eyes or ears
or noses shining in hubcaps,
and tongues rising from the asphalt
without justification.

All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

House Pits near Pounding Stone

Open music in a new window.

GHOSTS

A quarter-century after I first snaked
down through a foothill valley, down
along a dying creek at the base
of the foothills, I found the pounding stones

of a people who had vanished over a century ago,
some pounding stones only a few feet
from the road, one with pestles still on top,
less than a hundred feet from the barbed wire fence,

the mortars blanketed by dry leaves and shielded
by the drooping limb of a huge oak, the paths
I once thought created by cattle leading into clearings
where the earth appeared trampled, bare

and dark and a little greasy in places,
pounding stones nearby, and I followed every path
from Kings River to Dry Creek, a web connecting
ancient village sites across the foothills. Once,

at dusk, a band of coyotes began howling
by the creek, close to my car. I waited, straining
to see a ghost, until the howls began to drift away
into the valley, but nothing appeared. Twenty-five

years ago, a boy first drove here with his father,
a boy who could imagine herds gathering by the creek,
predators never far away, flocks of migrating birds
and butterflies drifting through. A few woodpeckers

remained, making granaries of rotting fence posts.
Once, following a trail away from the creek,
I spotted at eye level several rocks
on top of a large stone. I climbed a few feet

and found eleven pestles on a pounding stone,
as though just left the day before, one pestle
inside a mortar with a little grass growing around it.
Standing on a ridge, I gazed a long time

into the valley where in just over
one hundred years almost every trace of wildness
has been wiped out. I thought of a friend
who sued developers to preserve in trust

a few acres of farmland, what he called the last vestige
of nature in the Valley--he longer worked as a substitute
after a city official complained
about his organization to the school district;

of another activist fined over $100,000 for submitting
a "frivolous lawsuit" to stop urban sprawl by the river;
of my own organization brought down by a bogus lawsuit
tantamount to legal extortion, forced to settle

because of court costs, a lawsuit I can't describe
without fear of being sued; of those threatened
or fired because of their activism.
On that ridge, I was a ghost

of the Gashowu, seeing not herds
of antelope and deer and elk but a herd
of cattle in the floodplain, the new freeway
extension less than ten miles away,

the city lost in deepening smog,
a long pestle jutting
from a deep mortar at my feet, the woods
cold but still, a last howl far off in the distance.

 All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Wind Poppies and Chinese Purple Houses after Rough Fire

Open music in a new window.

A SHORT STUDY OF BREATH

We rub stalks of rosin weed and hold

our fingers to each other's nostrils, both

of us inhaling deeply. Late summer, the air

opening a small slope in the brain

that flowers with ever-increasing 

abundance, the neural energy shooting out 

vines, panicles, corymbs, spikes, racemes, umbels--

burgeoning, blossoming, dying back 

and supplanted, our breath taken in 

by these creatures and given back 

so tenderly and diffusely--no one yet ever

recording the impact from the breath 

of this flora on people or vice versa. The year 

my grandfather was mustard-gassed in France, 

Native Americans were setting up their last

encampments in these hills.  A hundred

and forty years or so after the Spanish 

first wandered here, my father was shipped out 

to Guam where he remained as Friant Dam 

was constructed, a dam that nearly wiped out

all flora and fauna on the valley floor,  

the fire-bombings causing great fire storms 

that sucked oxygen from the air, incinerating 

those caught in merciless winds. You propose

a short study of breath before time finally

catches up to these hills. I propose that, for

a decade or two, we observe the flora growing 

on this small slope where the barbed wire fence 

suddenly ends, before the subdivisions are dropped. 

For the price of a bomber, we could ensure

that numerous experimental subjects are healthy 

and fed well enough to experience fully

the unspeakably lovely flora, and we could 

then record how fresh air affects the human brain. 

Then we could establish the exact

connection to us of all wild, breathing creatures. 

All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Baby Blue Eyes near Oak Tree

Open music in a new window.

THE TERMINAL

The third time I passed the terminal on Cherry Street,
I recalled that I had worked there years before
on Saturdays cleaning up the trailers in the yard, painting
each back door orange and planting the company decal.

Another company had taken over the terminal, sold off
half the yard, added barbed wire to the top of the fence,
and left one trailer standing away from the dock.
Back then, on Saturdays the yard was deserted,

the sun pounding the blacktop and the metal of the trailers,
a hot breeze always causing settling sounds somewhere,
a gray fur growing everywhere, the trailers lined up
for departure to points all over the west coast, hiding me

all day from anyone who might have known me,
a land empty of illusion where a self was unnecessary.
My cousin worked with me twice. I must be an illusion
to him now, the terminal on Cherry Street forgotten,

the old company lost in a hostile takeover, its name
seen in the valley on one trailer stranded on a small farm
by the freeway. The last Saturday I worked with him
at the magical end of the summer before I began

my own glorious life, we jammed together, riffing
the songs of our youth on the empty loading dock,
smoking doobies. Who were you then? I have asked
that question too many times, not just of my cousin

and myself but of many who have disappeared
since that day, too many times not to realize that I
must be an illusion, not one self but a world,
one part earth, with the sun flowing

through plants and animals and pounding
through my veins, growing in my cells; one part
water that has flowed down the mountain slopes,
with trees and clouds mirrored in its skin as it flows;

one part air that circulates through the ocean
of breath; and one part the fire of desire--each creature
a world of earth, water, air, fire--yet my cousin
and I are the only ones who remember the fingers

on the guitar strings, the rock music
that ended years ago, the terminal
in merciless light, with someone
else there now to care for it.

  All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Tiger Lilies in High Forest

Open music in a new window.

ON THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF ELVIS PRESLEY'S DEATH,
I UNDERSTAND HOW TO SAVE A LIFE

They arrived in the junky Ford at dawn:
The King is dead--how can we go on? Mid
August, a light rain lacquering the asphalt,
the car meandering to Bear Creek. As I slammed
the door shut, a tiny pine cone stung my face.
Chasing each other through dense brush,
down a steep slope to the stream, splashing
through rapids, sliding down stones, our
pants soaked--how easily we could have
broken our necks, but I kept up even though
they were two years older. (I had spent
ten years keeping up.) Wordlessly
picking sides, my buddy and I cornered
the catalyst of the battle, pelting him
with tiny cones, and when we ran out
of ammo, the enemy nailed us both
and careened away, vanishing in manzanita.
Minutes later, a stone crashed through
the canopy, thudding nearby. Another stone,
the size of a fist, shattered the humus five
feet away. 

                  We screamed threats at them,
but rocks continued to rain down as we raced up
the slope, the battle petering out
when we cornered them, my buddy
holding me back. We chirped with joy
all the way back to the car. Thirty years
to the day, it hit me as I woke up:
They must have known, in early May,
that my friend and I had been caught in a car

(more than a little undressed) and shamed
by the police, my best friend
no longer allowed to see me. My father died
a week and a half later, but my friends
didn't mention that either.

So I returned to Bear Creek, the terrain
more treacherous than I remembered,
and struggled through dense brush to the first
boulders by the road, nothing beyond that familiar.
I hiked over fallen trees, broken branches,
until the slope dropped off abruptly, the creek
hundreds of feet below. As I thought about
turning back, I slipped on loose gravel and fell
flat on my face. Shocked by pain in legs and arms
and head, weak, a little sick, the blood pounding
in my ears, I thought: If I pass out, I
could slide two hundred feet down the slope
onto the rocks below.
                                    C'mon, get up.
Shake it off, I told myself, because that
is what my friends would have shouted at me.
I stood up, legs wobbly, and struggled
up the hill to safer ground, almost
passing out before I plopped down
on a smooth stone. As I slumped,
I remembered how, once, when
I couldn't stand, they grabbed me
under the arms and pulled me up,
yelling at me and steadying me 

until I could lurch forward.
That, I muttered to myself,
is how you save a life.