1630 Nature poems

Once, we were coming back From a fête votive in Goudargues When, sticky with pink barbe à papa, And queasy because The hairpinning road through St Marcel de Careiret Resembled the crazy-maze passage of our caroming bumper car, We were met by a stream of sangliers— Wild boars — Dashing across the D9 near the Forêt de Cavillargues. They pelted in a single ribbon, as I recall, So how could we even tell what they were, How distinguish that ruche of  shadow and wind From any other ghost of  the district? That year I came across A theory about the suffix –argues That trails behind village names all around here. (Vallérargues, St André d’Olérargues, Goussargues, Foussargues.) It may refer to an area of  land Given to Roman soldiers after service in North Africa By the praetor in Nîmes. Cavillargues. The acres of Cavillus, perhaps. The hairy pigs had emigrated, perhaps from the Caucasus, And no doubt had settled the Val de Tave long before Cavillus Arrived to begin gentrification. He wandered from the marble steps of the Maison Carrée, Perhaps having paid obeisance to Roman gods and governors, Perhaps uncertain from an encounter with the local plonk, And les sangliers came out to give him a thrill, And to tell him that this is not yet the Forêt de Cavillargues you can’t run through it as if you were a ground-level mistral with your feet like bound clumps of asparagus and your eyes on the Perseid meteor showers all roads lead to Rome except ours

NONES At three p.m. under sky coming to harm something too red flashes from a limb, so red it hurts: against sky coming apart, against a left-out, twice-soaked shirt, a cardinal inflames the profane cathedral of suburban yard its owner let fall into disgrace. How rain embarrasses the half-pruned hedge. The half-mown grass that sports a tonsure in reverse shines under the torture. Rain slicks with praise red shed, red feather. Crested seedeater out of character where you’re neither the strictly monkish brown thrasher nor the odd hermit thrush, you scratch in the underbrush of faith to see what you can flush: a grub. A seed. Eminence not grise but rouge, from your lipsticked beak you pass a sowbug to your mate. You peck at a slug sliming your path, seeming to beg your forgiveness. To what would you confess beyond season-to-season unfaithfulness? VESPERS There are more divine hours: a gold-leafed page a mower rows with a scythe as tall as the tower that tents aloft a tiny sky bereft of cloud, a chapel ceiling left unstarred, heaven a lake turned upside down, filled with an emptiness that’s clean because it’s cold, glacial enough to scald the skin it bathed, the lungs it filled. On devotion’s last page, deep in the golden age of illumination, the hunt’s cortège has halted at the edge of the known world, a clearing wedged in a forest of spears. Red bird the badge on the huntsman’s tunic, you’re the splash of crimson lake, the distant lordship’s flag, the cleric dog’s bright collar, its heretic tongue. It slavers on the bleeding stag. Snarling at prayer that chases belief, it licks the offal of grief, the heart cast aside reward enough.

Let me die on the prairie! and o’er my rude grave, In the soft breeze of summer the tall grass shall wave; I would breathe my last sigh as the bright hues of even Are melting away in the blue arch of Heaven. Let me die on the prairie! unwept and unknown, I would pass from this fair Earth forgotten, alone;— Yet no! – there are hearts I have learned to revere, And methinks there is bliss in affection’s warm tear. Oh, speak not to me of the green cypress shade; I would sleep where the bones of the Indian are laid, And the deer will bound o’er me with step light and free, And the carol of birds will my requiem be. Let me die on the prairie! I have wished for it long; There floats in wild numbers the bold hunter’s song; ’Tis the spot of all others the dearest to me, And how sweet in its bosom my slumber will be!

The island’s dark tonight. The radio crackles with static, news of a blackout, the voice coming through first loud, then soft, as if a storm were moving to cut all lifelines off. My one-room cabin has a bed, a table, a chair. Living this way, I understand better that scene by an anonymous illuminator: a row of monks eating at a rough table, diagonals of light slicing across the room to fall, as if by accident, on their simple meal. The black and white tiles on the floor a symbol of the formal repetitions of the simplest life, or maybe an oblique allusion to a paradox of theology: the complementary nature of good and evil. Is evil possible here where everyone lives so individually and nature appears to be neutral toward everything but itself? Some mornings I wake too suddenly, the light on the wall brilliant and unfamiliar, and wonder for a moment, where am I? I answer myself, my disembodied voice high and far off like what I imagine saints and martyrs heard in moments of ecstasy: Swan’s Island. Lightheaded, I rise, make coffee, settling into the simple ceremony of another morning. Outside the sea birds pick the clam flats clean, fly off, returning late in the afternoon looking for more to scavenge. Good days, I swim in the quarry, sun myself on the rocks, and plan a diary. One entry: I feel this place to be a rough approximation of heaven, the heaven of the lost ...

Two feet of snow at my parents’ place, in another season. Here, the cicadas sing like Christian women’s choirs in a disused cotton mill. Belief is a kind of weather. I haven’t seen proper snow for three years. The new urban forest for native plants and birds will be splendid if the local cats don’t kill the birds. The problem is, all my sympathies are with the cats. The friendly disturbers are more endearing than what they disturb. A trimaran called 3rd Degree spinning around its cable in the channel: that’s how love is here and should be everywhere. It seems so unserious or contentedly ironic; it’s the kind of thing you either look through or ignore. But you’d be wrong. The question isn’t: Why is love so strange here? It’s: Why did it feel normal somewhere else? In quiet places, the present is just gossip about the past. The future is a critique of that. All my best.

There was a message. I have forgotten it. There was a journey to make. It did not come to anything. But these nights, my friend, under the iron roof Of this old rabbiters' hut where the traps Are still hanging up on nails, Lying in a dry bunk, I feel strangely at ease. The true dreams, those longed-for strangers, Begin to come to me through the gates of horn. I will not explain them. But the city, all that other life In which we crept sadly like animals Through thickets of dark thorns, haunted by the moisture of women, And the rock of barren friendship, has now another shape. Yes, I thank you. I saw you rise like a Triton, A great reddish gourd of flesh, From the sofa at that last party, while your mistress smiled That perfect smile, and shout as if drowning— 'You are always—' Despair is the only gift; When it is shared, it becomes a different thing; like rock, like water; And so you also can share this emptiness with me. Tears from faces of stone. They are our own tears. Even if I had forgotten them The mountain that has taken my being to itself Would still hang over this hut, with the dead and the living Twined in its crevasses. My door has forgotten how to shut.

Already on the street with our money clutched in our hands, and the world is a white laundry, where we are boiled and wrung and dried and ironed, and smoothed down and forsaken we sweep back in children’s dreams of chains and jail and the heartfelt sigh of liberation and in the spark trails of feelings the fire eater the cigarette swallower come to light and we pay and distance ourselves with laughter.

On the street with our money clutched in our hands, buying bread and scattering breadcrumbs for the bluish doves. Paying to see the fire eater, the cigarette swallower and the dead vagabond who breathes. Greeting the palm tree that sighs at night. Saying a few words to the staring stone figure above the gate. Laughing and rushing in as if chased. In the cool kitchen we prepare and arrange our food. We make it as elegant as we can. Bouquet on the table and all. And we speak

Dawn comes later and later now, and I, who only a month ago could sit with coffee every morning watching the light walk down the hill to the edge of the pond and place a doe there, shyly drinking, then see the light step out upon the water, sowing reflections to either side—a garden of trees that grew as if by magic— now see no more than my face, mirrored by darkness, pale and odd, startled by time. While I slept, night in its thick winter jacket bridled the doe with a twist of wet leaves and led her away, then brought its black horse with harness that creaked like a cricket, and turned the water garden under. I woke, and at the waiting window found the curtains open to my open face; beyond me, darkness. And I, who only wished to keep looking out, must now keep looking in.

Her terrace was the sand And the palms and the twilight. She made of the motions of her wrist The grandiose gestures Of her thought. The rumpling of the plumes Of this creature of the evening Came to be sleights of sails Over the sea. And thus she roamed In the roamings of her fan, Partaking of the sea,