1630 Nature poems

The moon now rises to her absolute rule, And the husbandman and hunter Acknowledge her for their mistress. Asters and golden reign in the fields And the life everlasting withers not. The fields are reaped and shorn of their pride But an inward verdure still crowns them; The thistle scatters its down on the pool And yellow leaves clothe the river— And nought disturbs the serious life of men. But behind the sheaves and under the sod There lurks a ripe fruit which the reapers have not gathered, The true harvest of the year—the boreal fruit Which it bears forever, With fondness annually watering and maturing it. But man never severs the stalk Which bears this palatable fruit.

morning green through ivy leaves resuscitated on window let us also breathe our own breath and the birds their blood in arrows settle into nest from migration the cloud of their song woke me // stormed in me // a waterfall in the thrush’s call // a star flick ering in the sparrows we are not the woods if we whisper the woods quietly to ourselves we witness our hands walking into the forest we are two rooms who think alone // unless my ear saw the cardinal my eye heard the scarlet tanager I could not show it to you yesterday it existed as I exist now to you or the water pipit bobbing at burble of creek to one musical strand it heard and was harmony of and I saw from my distance the web we step through to enter woods: spider sews one point to branch and leaps where wind carries sews one point of silk to fern and leaps to where wind carries until the web in logic sees the plank in pine do you see the house already built the oak desk I think at the dark cherry night stand for your closed book by the bed we keep a light to turn off do you hear our whole house swaying in the wind those birds are not crying out in fear those birds are singing nuptials outside our house already built in the green canopy the quoin of air illumined always as it illumines let us be truer fact asleep below love a-leap // no cornerstone no cement save song do you hear above us the river strong in leaves the rubble wind flows over and is not wind river the rubblesource the river ripples over to sing us and the silken nest weighs the beech branch down in horror the multi tude breathing in a single lung and one cocoon countless in turns the transparent ever winging itself past hunger glows as we glow is woven of one single thread and no love thinks separate the weaver from the wing I say now I love you with the worm in my mouth spinning my words into your ear and your listening volumes pupa in the elm’s crotch and oak knot do you hear as I hear the old sins blossom from diaries and become the faith leaves live upon we eat not ink but the light that burns in the blank page so ink can more unselfish sing so the wounded deer leaps highest so heart quickens my hand cocooned in your hand to become each one half a wing of luna moth waiting in woods for night’s blossom the moon in borrowed light through dark unfathomed the dead star’s light still lights on leaf a finite edge we loathe the bounded and nowhere witness a cosmos in fetters the woods lit by the lantern blown out our eyes by bright stars no longer thinking love is bright our woods and us some star’s thought so the wild iris angles up in sun so sun is all stars and us the worm whose hunger sated in leaf again becomes hunger insatiable not for fact // this world in which nothing in the eye the instant dead stars cast out countless shrouds morning’s bright pall // Venus ascends ceaseless and wary the weak light one upon the other throws each moon waxing to each moon of the other’s face in full caught not in gazing at light we are what light gazes on lumen ensouling love so sigh so spiders feast by night so whippoorwills cry “poor will” so bobolinks wear the morning sun behind their heads unseen so light divides in two the star light sprang from and sews together again that star in us your sweet moan moon your linger languor your tongue on your lips not to speak so the moon glows on your lips in me the jack in pulpit blooms by night so I bloom so I give me to you so the appletree in flower proves not fruit but the sun in the mouth of the worm who grammars these woods into this world whose song is

Before the train screamed him through tunnels to his windowless office, the idiots he had to "sir," my father needed a space without us, so in a crack of light from the bathroom, he dressed, held his shoes by two fingers, and left us sleeping. That walk to the diner, the last stars fading out, the sky lightening from black to blue to white, was his time. He walked in all weather, let each season touch him all over, lifted his face to rain and sun. He liked to watch the old houses stir awake and nod to the woman in her slippers on 27th, smoking as she strolled her little mutt. To step back, smooth as Fred Astaire, from the paperboy's wild toss. Milk bottles sweated on doorsteps, sweet cream on top, and once, he lifted a quart from its wire basket, drank it down beneath our neighbor's winking porch light, and left the empty on the stoop.

How must it be to be moss, that slipcover of rocks?— imagine, greening in the dark, longing for north, the silence of birds gone south. How does moss do it, all day in a dank place and never a cough?— a wet dust where light fails, where the chisel cut the name.

She perches high on the stand, gleaming whistle dangling, on her suit a dutiful, faded red cross. Mine her only life to guard, she does for a while watch the middle-aged woman who has nothing better to do than swim laps in the Y's indoor pool on a late Friday afternoon. I am slow, though, boring, length after predictable length of breaststroke or the duller lap of elementary backstroke perfectly executed within the taut confines of the brightly buoyed lane. So she abandons me to study split-ends, hangnail, wristwatch, until—the body of the whistle cupped loosely in her palm—her head nods toward shallow dreams. I've never felt so safe in my life, making flawless, practiced turns, pushing, invisible to reenter my own wake, reverse it.

When I learned I might have cancer, I bought fifteen white lilies. Easter was gone: the trumpets were wilted, plants crooked with roots bound in pots. I dug them into the garden, knowing they would not bloom for another year. All summer, the stalks stood like ramshackle posts while I waited for results. By autumn, the stalks had flopped down. More biopsies, laser incisions, the cancer in my tongue a sprawling mass. Outside, the earth remained bare, rhizomes shrunken below the frost line. Spring shoots appeared in bright green skins, and lilies bloomed in July, their waxed trumpets pure white, dusting gold pollen to the ground. This year, tripled in number, they are popping up again. I wait, a ceremony, for the lilies to open, for the serpentine length of the garden to bloom in the shape of my tongue’s scar, a white path with one end leading into brilliant air, the other down the throat’s canyon, black and unforgiving. I try to imagine what could grow in such darkness. I am waiting for the lilies to open.

The cold earth slept below; Above the cold sky shone; And all around, With a chilling sound, From caves of ice and fields of snow The breath of night like death did flow Beneath the sinking moon. The wintry hedge was black; The green grass was not seen; The birds did rest On the bare thorn’s breast, Whose roots, beside the pathway track, Had bound their folds o’er many a crack Which the frost had made between. Thine eyes glow’d in the glare Of the moon’s dying light; As a fen-fire’s beam On a sluggish stream Gleams dimly—so the moon shone there, And it yellow’d the strings of thy tangled hair, That shook in the wind of night. The moon made thy lips pale, beloved; The wind made thy bosom chill; The night did shed On thy dear head Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie Where the bitter breath of the naked sky Might visit thee at will.

Little Robin Redbreast Sat upon a tree; Up went Pussy-cat, Down went he. Down came Pussy-cat, And away Robin ran; Says little Robin Redbreast “Catch me if you can.” Little Robin Redbreast Hopped upon a wall; Pussy-cat jumped after him, And almost got a fall. Little Robin chirped and sang, And what did Pussy say? Pussy-cat said “Mew,” and Robin flew away.

I must have passed the crest a while ago And now I am going down. Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know— But the brambles were always catching the hem of my gown. All the morning I thought how proud it would be To stand there straight as a queen— Wrapped in the wind and the sun, with the world under me. But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen. It was nearly level along the beaten track And the brambles caught in my gown— But it’s no use now to think of turning back, The rest of the way will be only going down. September 1919

Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings we owned that year, it was Red— skittish and prone to explode even at fourteen years—who’d let me hold to my face his own: the massive labyrinthine caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain up the head to the eyes. He’d let me stroke his coarse chin whiskers and take his soft meaty underlip in my hands, press my man’s carnivorous kiss to his grass-nipping upper half of one, just so that I could smell the long way his breath had come from the rain and the sun, the lungs and the heart, from a world that meant no harm.