In this essay I argue that Deborah Bird Rose’s interest in poetics derives from five broad themes in her work, which together constitute a powerful, ethical model of ecological poetics: an insistence on location and context; an understanding, derived from her Aboriginal teachers, of how to privilege [Dreaming] space over temporal sequence; an interest in open-ended, plural and perpetually unsettled forms; an appreciation of mystery, and the humility required to recognise it; and finally, a proto-ecological understanding of dance as both ceremonial or celebratory, and as a practice inherent to ecological function and its experience. Taken together, these themes underscore the irreducible singularity of places, which are imbued with musical, rhythmic structures that, with the right education and initiation, can become the basis for song and dance. In other words, through place we encounter rhythmic, musical expression, or poetry. Furthermore, Rose encourages her readers to take seriously the sensuous, embodied qualities of language acts, or the ways that they are inextricable from the times, places and bodies in which they occur. This is a poetics which recognises that a text is open and porous, and thoroughly entangled with the community in which it was composed. Accordingly, in the second half of this essay I will use Rose’s work to perform a reading of a story each from Indigenous Australia and North America. When considered in the terms of Rose’s poetics, these stories unfurl into complex, poetic events of multiple, sometimes contradictory directions, which remain resolutely tied to the grounded particularities of their production.