1630 Nature poems

I look out the window in upstate New York, see the Mediterranean stretching out below me down the rocky hillside at Faro, three years, two months, fourteen days earlier . 8:25 A. M. Rosemary gone back to sleep, pink & white . I stand at the livingroom window drinking coffee, open the doors to the balcony . Warmth beginning, tho I wrap my hands around the cup, count fishing boats in the sunglare, moving shoreward now slowly, or sitting there motionless on the flat sea . a fat blue arm stretches out from the coast, ripples where wind and currents show muscle below the blue skin of sea stretched out below me . The coffee’s cold toward the end of the cup . I go back to the kitchen for more hot . put orange in bathrobe pocket, reach for knife, return to the balcony with the fresh cup where the flat blue sea fills my eye in the sunglare . stretches out below me. The Southern Tier:    the maple outside the window warms in the early sun . red buds at the ends of branches commence their slow bursting . Green soon Joan moves her legs against mine in the hall, goes down to start my egg . Carlos thumps the lower stairs . We move. All our farewells al- ready prepared inside us   .   aaaall our deaths we carry inside us, double-yolked, the fragile toughness of the shell   .   it makes sustenance possible, makes love    possible as the red buds break against the sunglight possible green, as legs move against legs possible softnesses     .     The soft-boiled egg is ready now  . Now we eat. 19  .  IV  .  71

There is joy in the woods just now, The leaves are whispers of song, And the birds make mirth on the bough And music the whole day long, And God! to dwell in the town In these springlike summer days, On my brow an unfading frown And hate in my heart always— A machine out of gear, aye, tired, Yet forced to go on—for I’m hired. Just forced to go on through fear, For every day I must eat And find ugly clothes to wear, And bad shoes to hurt my feet And a shelter for work-drugged sleep! A mere drudge! but what can one do? A man that’s a man cannot weep! Suicide? A quitter? Oh, no! But a slave should never grow tired, Whom the masters have kindly hired. But oh! for the woods, the flowers Of natural, sweet perfume, The heartening, summer showers And the smiling shrubs in bloom, Dust-free, dew-tinted at morn, The fresh and life-giving air, The billowing waves of corn And the birds’ notes rich and clear:— For a man-machine toil-tired May crave beauty too—though he’s hired.

As if the flow of the waters From the triple streams of heavenly showers So the sacred Ao of the eighth heavens Whose flames have scorched the land. Chorus: Should our hearts’ love be restored And our rights be ours once more Then will our sacred beloved shoals of Kane Be the firm foundation of the land. The heavens expand and bestow Her beauteous crownlets free Its life to her people for offerings given And from loyal hearts ascended prayers. Cold words and looks reprove Oh, turn not thus away Give kindly greetings, words of love And a heart which beats within.

The bleached wood massed in bone piles, we pulled it from dark beach and built fire in a fenced clearing. The posts’ blunt stubs sank down, they circled and were roofed by milled lumber dragged at one time to the coast. We slept there. Each morning the minus tide— weeds flowed it like hair swimming. The starfish gripped rock, pastel, rough. Fish bones lay in sun. Each noon the milk fog sank from cloud cover, came in our clothes and held them tighter on us. Sea stacks stood and disappeared. They came back when the sun scrubbed out the inlet. We went down to piles to get mussels, I made my shirt a bowl of mussel stones, carted them to our grate where they smoked apart. I pulled the mussel lip bodies out, chewed their squeak. We went up the path for fresh water, berries. Hardly speaking, thinking. During low tide we crossed to the island, climbed its wet summit. The redfoots and pelicans dropped for fish. Oclets so silent fell toward water with linked feet. Jacynthe said little. Long since we had spoken Nova Scotia, Michigan, and knew beauty in saying nothing. She told me about her mother who would come at them with bread knives then stop herself, her face emptied. I told her about me, never lied. At night at times the moon floated. We sat with arms tight watching flames spit, snap. On stone and sand picking up wood shaped like a body, like a gull. I ran barefoot not only on beach but harsh gravels up through the woods. I shit easy, covered my dropping. Some nights, no fires, we watched sea pucker and get stabbed by the beacon circling on Tatoosh. 2 I stripped and spread on the sea lip, stretched to the slap of the foam and the vast red dulce. Jacynthe gripped the earth in her fists, opened— the boil of the tide shuffled into her. The beach revolved, headlands behind us put their pines in the sun. Gulls turned a strong sky. Their pained wings held, they bit water quick, lifted. Their looping eyes continually measure the distance from us, bare women who do not touch. Rocks drowsed, holes filled with suds from a distance. A deep laugh bounced in my flesh and sprayed her. 3 Flies crawled us, Jacynthe crawled. With her palms she spread my calves, she moved my heels from each other. A woman’s mouth is not different, sand moved wild beneath me, her long hair wiped my legs, with women there is sucking, the water slops our bodies. We come clean, our clits beat like twins to the loons rising up. We are awake. Snails sprinkle our gulps. Fish die in our grips, there is sand in the anus of dancing. Tatoosh Island hardens in the distance. We see its empty stones sticking out of the sea again. Jacynthe holds tinder under fire to cook the night’s wood. If we had men I would make milk in me simply.

1 pavlos looking out to sea explains: son costa, 20, will be coming home went with a sponge caiqui to nearby island a storm came up: the boat was smashed & sunk the boys all got ashore & will be coming home in another caiqui 2 late at night i saw them costa & the others they’d saved the sponges too unloaded them first in burlap bags then hoisted them onto their backs trotted up the stone steps plodded up a steep hill at mid- night mid- night to the store- house 3 at 5 in the morning at the cafeneion the captain described the wreck: the boat had turned over & over in the water churning it like a propell- er 4 costa went by later on his motor- cycle (tall & sombre) riding like an indian 5 spiro (young gypsy) fishes off the dock when he isn’t climbing hills & selling blankets 6 what can you do? i get bored around the house the children crying fighting can’t sit all day in the cafeneion so i fish 7 after an hour he rolls in his lines teaches me two words in the romany tongue for ‘no fish’ (in the plural) 8 pat mos pat mos an gels an gels kaly mnos kaly mnos men kaly mnos kaly mnos men pat mos pat mos an gels an gels kaly mnos kaly mnos men 9 stergo has a tired eye bright but weary when he looks at you he looks into you his eye takes the place of what- ever you were think- ing 10 his café is near the customs house (& the pier) he keeps it open till late at night & opens again at 5 in the morn- ing if ever his cus- tomers find it closed they walk right by (& won’t drink coffee anyplace else) 11 in the endless city the end- less city the beg- gars are in one place the cops in an- other the fine people here & the poor people there (each has his parish each his precinct) in the endless endless endless city

I don’t recall when I first understood why you stiffen at the roar of low flying jets— Did you tell me, Mother, or did I just know? When you refused to show me the caves like eyes in the hills behind Bah-chan’s house— Did I only dream it, how when the sirens began the trains stopped dead in their tracks, unleashing a stream of thousands to rush blind and headlong toward those sheltering hills— The damp press of strange bodies in darkness rank with the stench of war’s leavings, only imagine a young girl’s cries drowned in the tumult, urgent groping of unseen hands— the bombs raining d0wn on Yokohama Harbor all through the night, hothouse blooms crackling in a seething sky, then hissing into a boiling sea— Was it a millennium that passed before the sirens ceased their wailing, only to be taken up again by the dogs and the dying? But you talk of none of this today. We walk slowly, saying little, as if less said will keep the heat at bay. The air is wet, heavy with summer smells carried aloft on the hypnotic drone of cicadas. You show me where as a girl you played in other summers, catching kabuto beetles and dragonflies in bamboo cages. What must go through you when we pass them at a distance, those black maws yawning out of the hillside, exhaling the unspeakable?

We’ve come back to the site of   her conception. She calls it why and cries all night, sleepless, wild. It seems the way is always floating and the goal — to live so the ghosts we were don’t trail us and echo. I think we are inside a flower, under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand. The air pulses with perfume, flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air. But my eyes are thin and elsewhere. I am thinking, maybe even coming into the soul is a difficult birth, squeezed by the body’s vise. My bent legs like pincers or the vegetable petals of some tropical flower. Even my mind gripped by the folds of   the flesh, how the cells keep twinning themselves out toward complexity. The tulip trees of   the valley spread their bone canopies into slick green leaves and fire flowers deep as cups. Their cups fill with rain, rain drinks the leaves drinking rain. I can’t begin to explain. How on this porous peak of stone in the sea our daughter came into me. Little flick of a fish I could not see. I was just learning to be human and upright among all that life. And what was real was stranger than night with its dust of unnamed suns. It was the beyond in us. And she was.

What a relief you cannot live everywhere all at once. Today, here in Diamond Cave, there's no longer any reason to live. Stay one or two days: this world & the Other are drained of difference. Wind blows. As a pearl is born at seabottom in agony out of oyster flesh from within the most obscure darkness here the wind blows from the depths. I want to travel far & then return. The wind blows as if I were eighty-five, maybe eighty-seven.

The black kitten cries at her bowl meek meek and the gray one glowers from the windowsill. My hand on the can to serve them. First day of spring. Yesterday I drove my little mother for hours through wet snow. Her eightieth birthday. What she wanted was that ride with me— shopping, gossiping, mulling old grievances, 1930, 1958, 1970. How cruel the world has been to her, how uncanny she’s survived it. In her bag, a birthday card from “my Nemesis,” signed Sincerely with love—

A million years ago the earth grew cold. Iowa was covered by twenty-five hundred feet of ice. No one knows why the glaciers formed and spread, or why they eventually retreated. I blinked and you were gone. As a boy, he loved the idea of the ice age. Lumbering woolly mammoths and giant sloths. Outside, a vast white edict erasing the landscape. Inside his head, cave paintings of bison leapt in the firelight, their horns spiraling upward, the tips smoking. Men on skis came to dig you out. Though they worked all night, they were too late. Waking every day the frost reasserts itself. Its relentlessness a tedium, a closure. The earth must have looked more familiar when all was water. We don’t recognize ourselves amidst this overwhelming winter: static that censors newscasts, cold that burns, incessant dripping as icicles perfect themselves. The night skies are a riot of Chinese silk: bolts of crimson and shadow-blue. The radio crackles faintly. Medical refuse litters the beaches, spews into the water from a backed up sewer under the pier. Bacteria cavort in the seawater. The weather’s gone haywire all over the globe. The more sensitive you are the earlier you’ll die. Just hold your breath a little longer, dear. Once you start this medication, you can’t stop. Your life changes. You decide, based on a dearth of information, which force you want to submit to:nature, now less maternal than ever, or her idiot son—modern medicine. You make an effort to find some grand design in this blindness. If you can’t see well enough anymore to edit your film, perhaps you can still do the music. You set an example. Lemme outa here. As a boy, before his mother found out and made him stop, he’d bury the frozen birds he found on the porch after big storms by warming the earth first with his father’s blowtorch. Being human, we can’t help attempting to arrange events into patterns—the way a sick man sees faces in the stains on his bedroom ceiling. He names them. Months later, they all converse. The men in the ice-covered radio station play cards and drink bourbon. What defense can one mount against an avalanche? Spotless beakers, pipettes, rows of small cages. Welcome to the lab. Here’s the chamber where we run preliminary screenings. Better don these gloves. Why not use two pair, like me? The new man on the night shift nods off over his work, with the radio playing. Its tinny strands of music enter his dream disguised as a dead friend’s hair. He had short coarse hair, like a terrier’s, pleasantly stiff to the touch. The lab is brightly lit to ward off the backwash of night. Under the table the research assistant’s feet twitch spasmodically in his sleep. A series of blurry black-and-white newsreels flickers on the screen. Martian canals overflow their banks. A lake in Africa exhales a cloud of poison gas, killing thousands of villagers on its shores. Venice sinks. Anchorage, Alaska, is leveled by earthquakes. Pompeii is breaded and fried by its volcano. The swamp swallows another sand bar, then coughs up a tiny island. Subzero temperatures paralyze Acapulco.There have been several ice ages, a female narrator intones.The most recent lasted 90,000 years. A timer goes off and the lab assistant jerks awake. In about the time it takes to drink a glass of water, he remembers where he is. “This is probably the last time I will write to you . . .” The rocks applaud. Summers turn short and cool. The world remakes itself without us now.