1630 Nature poems

Now here is a typical children’s story that happens in gorgeous October when the mothers are coming in the afternoon, wearing brisk boots and windy skirts to pick up the little children from the day care center Frost in the air the maples golden and crimson my son in a leaf pile in the playground dreaming I am late, the playground is almost empty, my husband will kill me I gather my son to go home, he forgets his sweater in the playground and I send him back he dawdles, he is playing with leaves in his mind, it is already a quarter to six, will you come on I say and hurry along the corridor, there are yellow and blue rocket paintings, but I feel bad and ask what did you do today, do you recognize this story, the way he stands and picks his nose, move I say, do you want dinner or not I’m going to make a nice dinner, fried chicken I wheedle, so could you please walk a little faster, okay, I walk a little faster and get upstairs myself, pivot on boot-heel, nobody there, he is putting something in his mouth, his sable eyelashes downcast, and I am swooping down the stairwell screaming damn you that’s filthy I told you not before dinner We are climbing the stairs and I am crying, my son is not crying I have shaken him, I have pried the sweet from his cheek I have slapped his cheek like a woman slapping a carpet with all my strength mothers are very strong he is too young to do anything about this will not remember he remembers it The mind is a leaf pile where you can bury anything, pain, the image of a woman who wears a necklace of skulls, a screaming woman you dig quickly and deposit the pulpy thing you drop leaves on it and it stays there, that is the story that is sticking in my mind as we push the exit door, and run through the evening wind to my car where I jerk the gearshift and pick up a little speed, going along this neat suburban avenue full of maples the mark of my hand a blush on my son’s cheek.

Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn The language of the trees. That’s done indoors, Out of a book, which now you think of it Is one of the transformations of a tree. The words themselves are a delight to learn, You might be in a foreign land of terms Like samara, capsule, drupe, legume and pome, Where bark is papery, plated, warty or smooth. But best of all are the words that shape the leaves— Orbicular, cordate, cleft and reniform— And their venation—palmate and parallel— And tips—acute, truncate, auriculate. Sufficiently provided, you may now Go forth to the forests and the shady streets To see how the chaos of experience Answers to catalogue and category. Confusedly. The leaves of a single tree May differ among themselves more than they do From other species, so you have to find, All blandly says the book, “an average leaf.” Example, the catalpa in the book Sprays out its leaves in whorls of three Around the stem; the one in front of you But rarely does, or somewhat, or almost; Maybe it’s not catalpa? Dreadful doubt. It may be weeks before you see an elm Fanlike in form, a spruce that pyramids, A sweetgum spiring up in steeple shape. Still,pedetemtim as Lucretius says, Little by little, you do start to learn; And learn as well, maybe, what language does And how it does it, cutting across the world Not always at the joints, competing with Experience while cooperating with Experience, and keeping an obstinate Intransigence, uncanny, of its own. Think finally about the secret will Pretending obedience to Nature, but Invidiously distinguishing everywhere, Dividing up the world to conquer it, And think also how funny knowledge is: You may succeed in learning many trees And calling off their names as you go by, But their comprehensive silence stays the same.

At forty-eight, to be given water, which is most of the world, given life in water, which is most of me, given ease, which is most of what I lack, here, where walls don’t part to my hands, is to be born as of three weeks ago. Taking nothing from you, mother, or you, sky, or you, mountain, that you wouldn’t take if offered by the sea, any sea, or river, any river, or the pool, beside which a woman sits who would save me if I needed saving, in a red suit, as if flame is the color of emergency, as I do, need saving, from solid things, most of all, their dissolve.

Chimerical, the rhinoceros egret, its keratin dehorned in South Africa and container-shipped to Vietnam or China where it’s ground by aphrodisiasts and snorted by affluent boneheads, metamorphs into the hippopotamus egret, the elephant, Cape buffalo, zebra, giraffe, the ostrich, and the camel egret, the deep-domed tortoise, and in the Americas the cow heron or cattle egret. Ranging like wildfire over the last century, a migration prodded by the transmutation of forests into ranches, the cattle egret writhes and champs and tilts and plods and darts in cursive at grasshoppers. And where its livestock gets concentrated, decapitated, tenderized, charred, whatever, the Bubulcus ibis or cattleman wader, capitalizing on a field without cattle, reinvents itself as the tractor egret though the unattached bird is emblem enough of the other end of extinction, ignition, when not just its shaggy breeding crest and breast plumage go up in flame but its legs, beak, lores, and irises catch color.

Years do odd things to identity. What does it mean to say I am that child in the photograph at Kishamish in 1935? Might as well say I am the shadow of a leaf of the acacia tree felled seventy years ago moving on the page the child reads. Might as well say I am the words she read or the words I wrote in other years, flicker of shade and sunlight as the wind moves through the leaves.

for Richard Hugo The Rev. Royal Filkin preaches tomorrow on why we are sad. Brethren, Montana’s a landscape requiring faith: the visible government arrives in trucks, if you live out far enough. If you live in town, the government’s gone, on errands, in trucks. Let citizens go to meetings, I’ll stay home. I hate a parade. By the time you get the trout up through the tiny triangular holes in the Coors cans, they’re so small you have to throw them back. Glum miles we go to Grandmother’s house. The earth out here doesn’t bear us up so much as it keeps us out, an old trick of the beautiful. Remember what Chief Left Hand said? Never mind. Everything else was taken from him, let’s leave his grief alone. My Eastern friends ask me how I like it in the West, or God’s country, as it’s sometimes called, though God, like a slumlord, lives in the suburbs: Heaven. And I don’t live “in the West”; I live in this canyon among a few other houses and abandoned mines, vaccinations that didn’t take.

The floor, moonlit, the moon behind you, is not enclosed by walls; a patch of sky is hidden by distant trees. But a patch of floor is 
itself hidden by the sky’s legs, standing on it, and this cannot be the 
opportunity for useless thoughts. Translated from the French

What is so pure as grief? A wreck set sail just to be wrecked again. To lose what’s lost–it’s all born lost and we just fetch it for a little while, a dandelion span, a quarter-note. Each day an envelope gummed shut with honey and mud. Foolish to think you can build a house from suffering. Even the hinges will be bitter. There will be no books in that house, only transfusions. And all the lemon and cedar in the world won't rid the walls of that hospital smell.

A tree that grew in the Garden of Eden a tree of innocence called the Tree of Good and Evil. It was harmless as opposites are in balance. It was also tasteless, the taste of innocence before it is betrayed. When God removed the wall he gave the lemon thorns and bitterness because it had no hostility. It is a taste we want most to subdue. It asks to be left alone. We use it with fish and tea. We sugar it. Look out the window. It stands with a donkey’s stance, hoping the day will pass. Its scent through the curtains cuts through mustiness, sharp with sweet blossoms. It hides the smell of new babies.

The eyeballs on her behind are like fire Leaping and annoying The space they just passed Just like fire would do The ground have no mouth to complain And the girl is not braver herself She is beautiful in her spotted Leopard ensemble. Heartless so To keep her fashionalbe in New York Leopards are dying Crude comments flutter around her At lunchtime. She sure look good She remembers nine banishing speeches More powerful than this is the seam Of the leotard under her clothing Her tail in the leotard is never still The seam! She feels it too familiar on her leg As some crumb says something suggestive The leopard embracing around her Is too chic to leap and strike Her thoughts fall back to last semester’s karate Underneath, the leotard crouches up on her thigh It is waiting for its terrible moment!