1630 Nature poems

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe! Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought! And giv'st to forms and images a breath And everlasting motion! not in vain, By day or star-light, thus from my first dawn Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me The passions that build up our human soul; Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man; But with high objects, with enduring things, With life and nature; purifying thus The elements of feeling and of thought, And sanctifying by such discipline Both pain and fear,—until we recognise A grandeur in the beatings of the heart. Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me With stinted kindness. In November days, When vapours rolling down the valleys made A lonely scene more lonesome; among woods At noon; and 'mid the calm of summer nights, When, by the margin of the trembling lake, Beneath the gloomy hills, homeward I went In solitude, such intercourse was mine: Mine was it in the fields both day and night, And by the waters, all the summer long. And in the frosty season, when the sun Was set, and, visible for many a mile, The cottage-windows through the twilight blazed, I heeded not the summons: happy time It was indeed for all of us; for me It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud The village-clock tolled six—I wheeled about, Proud and exulting like an untired horse That cares not for his home.—All shod with steel We hissed along the polished ice, in games Confederate, imitative of the chase And woodland pleasures,—the resounding horn, The pack loud-chiming, and the hunted hare. So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle; with the din Smitten, the precipices rang aloud; The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; while far-distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy, not unnoticed while the stars, Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away. Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay, or sportively Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, To cut across the reflex of a star; Image, that, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the glassy plain: and oftentimes, When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on either side Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid line of motion, then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels, Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round! Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a summer sea.

Stairs & rites not for the foot The building thinks Angular rock Green skyscraper Black ziggurat Miniature of time Made into altar Invention of the night Sprouting at dawn Carved rock praying as it buds Seeking the seed to sprout! Saliva in torrents Cooling waterfall You redeem your field Salt head Stream of lights Double reflection Stone & water The same sprouting

This Sycamore, oft musical with bees,— Such tents the Patriarchs loved! O long unharmed May all its agèd boughs o'er-canopy The small round basin, which this jutting stone Keeps pure from falling leaves! Long may the Spring, Quietly as a sleeping infant's breath, Send up cold waters to the traveller With soft and even pulse! Nor ever cease Yon tiny cone of sand its soundless dance, Which at the bottom, like a Fairy's Page, As merry and no taller, dances still, Nor wrinkles the smooth surface of the Fount. Here Twilight is and Coolness: here is moss, A soft seat, and a deep and ample shade. Thou may'st toil far and find no second tree. Drink, Pilgrim, here; Here rest! and if thy heart Be innocent, here too shalt thou refresh Thy spirit, listening to some gentle sound, Or passing gale or hum of murmuring bees!

That hour-glass-backed, orchard-legged, heavy-headed will, paper-folded, wedge-contorted, savage—dense to kill— pulls back on backward-moving, arching high legs still, lowered through a deep, knees-reaching, feathered down green will, antenna-honest, thread-descending, carpeted as if with skill, a focus-changing, sober-reaching, tracing, killing will.

In those days I thought their endless thrum was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights. In the throats of hibiscus and oleander I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells enameled hard as the sky before the rain. All that summer, my second, from city to city my young father drove the black coupe through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever parceled between luggage and sample goods. Afternoons, showers drummed the roof, my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew something of love was cruel, was distant. Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid Father’d pinned in her hair shriveled to a purple fist. A necklace of shells coiled her throat, moving a little as she murmured of alligators that float the rivers able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years. And always the trance of blacktop shimmering through swamps with names like incantations— Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand and pointed to an egret’s flight unfolding white above swamp reeds that sang with insects until I was lost, until I was part of the singing, their thousand wings gauze on my body, tattooing my skin. Father rocked me later by the water, the motel balcony, singing calypso with the Jamaican radio. The lyrics a net over the sea, its lesson of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed over his shoes, over the rail where the citronella burned merging our shadows—Father’s face floating over mine in the black changing sound of night, the enormous Florida night, metallic with cicadas, musical and dangerous as the human heart.

One way to erase an island is to invent a second island absolved of all the sounds the first one ever made. We don’t know who concocted this one, where the triggerfish and clowns fade to inky neon dashes under a fisherman’s skiff. A few plastic pontoons knock around makeshift slips. Dusk coaxes from the shore the small, dull chime of a spoon against a pot. And TV voices flash slow across a cliff where two pink lovers in matching swimwear kiss their glasses at the edge of a blue pool built just low enough into the hill so the couple can gaze into the sea and think of infinity. Many, many years ago, a great emperor wiggled his finger and commanded his army to corral all the lepers in his domain then pack them into a sailing ship to be delivered to the missions on this cluster of verdant volcanic rock. The emperor’s orders to his captain were clear: if the monks refused the ship’s freight, the skipper was to simply dump the whole sick cargo far from any shore. Other incurables followed in lots over time, or trickled in, hiding from nearby tribes, or banished from other lands to live among these lush slopes of mahogany, papaya, and weeds. Two women, Filomena and Josefa, arrived within days of one another. By then, each had lost most their toes, though they had ten full fingers between them, each woman with one hand still intact. No one is sure how it began, but once a week the pair would knock on the door of the scowling Madre Clementina to borrow the hospital’s only guitar, carved from jackfruit and cracked pretty bad along the back. To these women — no big deal, for Filomena once transcribed the early moonlight serenades of the horny friars in the Royal South for the brats of an Andalusian duke. Josefa was the daughter of a carpenter, a maker of tables to be exact. She learned to play a harana’s tremulous melodies on her mother’s bandurria at the age of three. The pair of outcasts would stifle laughs, thrilled to earn the crusty nun’s grudging Yes, then amble out to low tide and find a flat rock to share so they could prop the old guitar on both their laps, the one bad wrist of each woman unwrapped to their stumps, pulled for now behind their backs as they looked past the bay toward the violent waters that first carried them here. And they jammed. Filomena with the five deft hammers of her left and Josefa with her right, thick-muscled — both blue-veined and furious, scrubbing from the instrument all those wicked rhythms from Castile to Nowhere on a fragile scrap of furniture that could barely hold its tune. They sat shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh, their good hands brushing from time to time. What they couldn’t remember, they made up, and everything they made up disappeared over the lagoon and over the ocean, every note in every run, every lie and desire, every nick and crack in the jackfruit, the fat harmonics plucked from the old nun’s grunts, six taut strands of gut whose chords skimmed the water like night locusts in bursts of low clouds and which bore everything in front of them and behind, the brine of the women’s necks mixed with the salt of the lagoon, the cliffs, the spoons, the bright nimbus of the West dipping like a noose, the future of pontoons and fake tits, the history of nifty crowns pried loose of their jewels, the jiggle of a little finger gone still. One way to erase an island is to invent the waters that surround it. You can name the waters that will turn all the sounds the island makes into salt. It will teach you to listen to everything you love disappear    ...    or you can invent a song so big it will hold the entire ocean. Josefa and Filomena rocked in the dark, hip to hip, joined by that third body of wood, which made sure there was nothing left in the unbroken world to possibly make them whole.

A mother possum crawled down the chimney the spring Donny came to us because both sets of his parents had kicked him out, the same April after your dad and I divorced when you kicked a hole in the dining room wall. The possum was swollen with young she would later carry, half-grown, on her back or hanging from her thick, hairless tail. “An oversized rat with maternal instincts,” your dad once said. Instead of one angry son, I now had two– fifteen and seventeen– two forged signatures on absence excuses, two discipline committee meetings, two conferences with the principal. While I worked, you shared contraband beer, as well as the basement bedroom with its fieldstone fireplace in which you found the possum one cool evening. Laughing and cheering, you teamed up to cage her with a trash can, carry her to the alley out back and dump her. The possum squeezed back down the chimney twice more. The third time you threw her out on Troost Avenue, screaming for a car to smash her beneath its tires. She must have been near her time, desperate for a nest, to crawl back down after that. The noise woke me after midnight. Donny had clubbed her with his nunchuks. You both kicked and stomped her head as she lurched, stumbled between your feet. Halfway down the basement steps I stopped, seeing your faces. The possum fell limp. I backed slowly up the stairs. In the morning, you couldn’t meet my eyes. I just made you clean up the mess.

Noon, March 6, 1997 From morning’s mouth the bones emerge, a prayer is whispered over rounded horns; the prairie is beyond the quivering hump and holy smoke sparkles released in the breath. Braided sweetgrass, be about their hooves; although the grip of hunger lies heavy on the land, let endless native grasses grow among the yellow stones and between the stars. Even if only one man had begun to sing, actually it was thousands, She who came to Wisconsin farmers and transformed their lives, She who brought her blessing in the form of being newborn, She whom they named the Miracle, White Buffalo Calf Maiden must return amid the fast firing of bullets, along the most perilous of paths. Rock stars, millionaires, they all offered millions of dollars to struggling white farmers but she had begun her transformation and her prophecy by touching them and they came to understand if not the actual words to the prayers at least the reverence, the need to protect, to keep the doors open. Like it was a hundred years ago bounties are gathered from death; trains, buses, cars, planes carry the segmented body of the terrible worm across the land and the screams of the hunted split the sun awake. It is time to restore the stolen beads and shards, the bones and knives to every grave. And the graves are graves no longer but wombs; the bounties burn their hands and bones come flowing from museum shelves to dance in the rippling grass, rebuilding lungs, starting hearts. There must be a hundred men and a hundred men’s worth of heartlessness; wished they could find Indians to kill but now that is illegal so they make up some excuse to raise their rifles and take aim, not hearing the rumble of buffalo prayer, not feeling tomorrow tremble or the prophecy of Miracle, and smile as they see the legs give way, the horns gouge open the prairie ground, Earth betrayed again.

A cigarette kiss in the desert. The wind-proof arc of flame sparks inside the speeding Buick. Menthol: a break from the monotony of highway nicotine— most intimate of drugs. Make this mean sorrow or thermodynamics, whatever small gesture there is time for. Light another one, the vainglorious interstate dusk and ash—the long, silver tooth. This shirtless abandon, this ninety-mile-an-hour electric laugh. The edges of windshield, haphazard chatter. The clatter of the hubcap and the thunderclap: the white-hot retinal memory of your life as a Joshua tree. Permanence in the passenger seat. This long haul, this first drag—nothing like cinnamon, nothing like the iron taste on the back of your mortal tongue.

Come our one great bushfire pigs, sty-released, declined to quit their pavements of gravel and shit. Other beasts ran headlong, whipping off with genitals pinched high. Human mothers taught their infants creek-dipping. Fathers galloped, gale-blown blaze stripping grass at their heels and on by too swift to ignite any houses. One horse baked in a tin shed, naked poultry lay about dead having been plucked in mid flight but where pigs had huddled only fuzzy white hoofprints led upwind over black, B B B and none stayed feral in our region.