1630 Nature poems

In May’s gaud gown and ruby reckoning the old saw wind repeats a colder thing. Says, you are the bluest body I ever seen. Says, dance that skeletal startle the way I might. Radius, ulna, a catalogue of flex. What do you think you’re grabbing with those gray hands? What do you think you’re hunting, cat-mouth creeling in the mouseless dawn? Pink as meat in the butcher’s tender grip, white as the opal of a thigh you smut the lie on. In May’s red ruse and smattered ravishings you one, you two, you three your cruder schemes, you blanch black lurk and blood the pallid bone and hum scald need where the body says I am and the rose sighs Touch me, I am dying in the pleatpetal purring of mouthweathered May.

In the backyard of our house on Norwood, there were five hundred steel cages lined up, each with a wooden box roofed with tar paper; inside, two stories, with straw for a bed. Sometimes the minks would pace back and forth wildly, looking for a way out; or else they’d hide in their wooden houses, even when we’d put the offering of raw horse meat on their trays, as if they knew they were beautiful and wanted to deprive us. In spring the placid kits drank with glazed eyes. Sometimes the mothers would go mad and snap their necks. My uncle would lift the roof like a god who might lift our roof, look down on us and take us out to safety. Sometimes one would escape. He would go down on his hands and knees, aiming a flashlight like a bullet of light, hoping to catch the orange gold of its eyes. He wore huge boots, gloves so thick their little teeth couldn’t bite through. “They’re wild,” he’d say. “Never trust them.” Each afternoon when I put the scoop of raw meat rich with eggs and vitamins on their trays, I’d call to each a greeting. Their small thin faces would follow as if slightly curious. In fall they went out in a van, returning sorted, matched, their skins hanging down on huge metal hangers, pinned by their mouths. My uncle would take them out when company came and drape them over his arm—the sweetest cargo. He’d blow down the pelts softly and the hairs would part for his breath and show the shining underlife which, like the shining of the soul, gives us each character and beauty.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. Their irregular branches, like broken arms backlit from MRI dye, offset by yearning. They take form in ways only experts can decipher. The light is blue. The observation of the alien doctor flickers in his iris, furnace gaslight burning like a pagan memorial. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, I pity their need for idolatry. It bares itself only to the void of me, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility. I am unable to convince them otherwise. I hear them mew and compete as if for a rough teat's clear nutrition. Foolish rule of the organic, uncultured and out of control. I am mum and tidy as a nun in comparison. Though capable of devastation are my desires which punish the landscape with recrimination, uprooting the hedges. They swallow fire, speak in four languages, and love no one. I shudder with pride as they push themselves back to their origin, to the scraped-out bottom of a uterine nothing; this hard loneliness, skull-solid, pushed back into vagueness until it succumbs as if overwhelmed by barbiturates. Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place Separated from my house by a row of headstones. Its green vapors trigger an olfactory déjà vu like a recurrent nightmare. I envy the buried faces finally freed from worry and ailment, from the pressure to remain always forward-thinking. I picture their release, the prostrate bodies floating up as if levitated. What peace, what stillness was shoveled onto their pine box beds where darkness then dropped, all at once, final as an execution. I simply cannot see where there is to get to. The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. I identify with its nausea. It meets me in the mirror uninvited, this face beneath my face, restless and unwilling. It formulates inside me like a kicking fetus and refuses to be ignored. It haunts and threatens like a past trauma. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; mute as a mug shot, it is quiet, like someone suffocated who suddenly stops struggling. I recognize in its warm death the expression of the starving With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. Against me a force, not stronger or more intelligent, but more adaptable to poor weather like dandelions. I can feel it whittle me down to horse feed pellets. I'm being winnowed out of the earth's circulation, with a pairing incremental as this winter's passing. Twice on Sunday the bells startle the sky— Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection. I'm forced to listen to the liturgical lecturing, truant student of a catechism I loathe. At the end, they soberly bong out their names; Myths and ideals I could never bring myself to believe in, my prayers, the self-flagellation of unrequited love. The yew tree points up like a New England steeple. It has a Gothic shape. It used to remind me of home. The eyes lift after it and find the moon. Once fragile as rice paper, it hangs static and tough like a noose signifying more hardship ahead— interrogating flashlight that hurts my eyes. Now no home exists—just an empty bed, a pile of mangled sheets atop a dark wood floor, like snow atop the frozen mud tracks of hoof and wheel. The moon is my mother.She is not sweet like Mary. She licks her white feathers and stares back with one eye vicious as a swan about to bite. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. I watch, my leg caught in the truth of my life where beyond human emotion I've traveled at this point. How I would like to believe in tenderness— in those symbolic unions that elicit sweet concepts: mother and child, father and daughter, husband and wife. The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, its cheekbones flushed with an afterworld favoritism Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes; hair waving, mouth parted in mid-speech like drowned Ophelia. I have fallen a long way. I lie at the bottom, smashed like a dinner plate against kitchen tile, china chips and jagged bits. I lie at the bottom, shattered and dangerous, looking up with a baby's stunned engrossment. I'm moving closer to Pluto and Mars. Clouds are flowering blue and mystical over the face of the stars,— It will not be quick. Death drinks me in, slow as syrup. Inside the church, the saints will be all blue. They've ascended into heaven's oxygen-deprived morgue. Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, Their hands and faces stiff with holiness, mannequins perennially enacting the nativity in a wax museum. The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild as one dying of cancer. She begs for relief, but her pillow-muffled shrieks disperse with the other sounds and shadows of the night. We are left alone, her cadaver face, gaunt and grim, prescient of mine. And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence. Sylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree," Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1961)

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.