1630 Nature poems

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.

From where I stood at the field’s immaculate edge, walking past the open patch of land that’s money bounded, in California’s flat sunlight, by suburban shadows of houses occupied by professors, lawyers, radically affluent do-gooders, simple casual types, plus a few plumbers, children of lettuce-pickers and microchip princes, grandchildren of goatherds and orchard keepers who pruned and picked apricot trees that covered what wasn’t yet block after block. Vaporized by money, by the lords and ladies of money, in one month, on one block, three bungalows bulldozed, and the tanky smells of goatherds and, before them, dirt farmers who never got enough water, held momentary in the air like an album snapshot’s aura, souls of roller-rink sweethearts and sausage-makers fleeing heaps of crusty lath, lead pipe, tiny window casements, then new foundations poured for cozy twelve-room houses. So what was she doing in that field among weeds and ice plant? The yellow and pink blooms spiking around her feet like glory? Cranking her elbow as surveyors do, to a bored watcher in the distance, she fanned the air, clouds running low and fast behind her. A voice seeped through the moodless sunlight as she seemed to talk to the flowers and high weeds. She noticed me, pointed in my direction. Accusation, election, I could not tell, nor if it was at me myself or the green undeveloped space she occupied, welded into her grid by traffic noise.Okay! A word for me? A go-ahead?Okay! Smeared by the wind and maybe not her own voice after all. I held my place. She would be one of the clenched ministers adrift in bus terminals and K-Marts, carrying guns in other parts of America, except she dressed like a casual lady of money, running shoes, snowbird sunglasses, wristwatch like a black birthday cake. The voice, thin and pipey, came from the boy or girl, blond like her, who edged into view as I tracked the shot. The child, staring down while he cried his song, slowly tread the labyrinth of ice plant’s juicy starburst flesh of leaves. Okay! He follows the nested space between flowers that bristle at his feet, his or hers, while the desiccated California sky so far from heaven and hell beams down on us beings of flower, water, and flesh before we turn to money. The sky kept sliding through the tips of weeds. The sky left us behind.

If a garden is the world counted and found analogue in nature One does not become two by ever ending so the stairs must be uneven in number and not exceed thirteen without a pause of two paces’ width, which for instance, the golden section mitigates between abandon and an orchestra just behind those trees, gradations of green that take a stethoscope: we risk: Length over width to make the horizon run straight equals to make the pond an oval: Width over length minus the width in which descending circles curl into animals exact as a remainder. Which means excess. The meaning of the real always exceeds that of the ideal, said someone. He was speaking of Vaux-le-Vicomte, but it’s equally true of parking, or hunting, or wishing you could take it back. He who is Allen Weiss, actually said, “The meaning of a plastic or pictorial construct always surpasses the ideal meaning of that work.” Which is something else entirely. Said the axonometric divided by the anamorphic. There is nothing that controls our thoughts more than what we think we see, which we label “we.”

Why is it, in Bristol Bay, a sea cormorant hovers, sings a two-fold song with a hinged cover for a mouth, teeth set in sockets, with a hissing grind of spikelets biting the air? Dip one. The lips of vanished flames in lava coals glow vermillion as an egg cracks. Dip two. She/I feel/s a chimera leaving the eider duck. Dip three. While still in the embryo, separating the body from death she/I smell/s of arsenic, the Chugach Range in unnatural bitterness. Why is it, man’s/woman’s nerve scarcely stifled and sane, comes to prey? While they swoon minerals of crude oil and sea spiders for tricking a way for gold. Will they crawl around her/me, sink their eyeteeth in the sea, ravaging the ecosphere and the ore gold for fuel. Drill.

If you catch a firefly and keep it in a jar You may find that you have lost A tiny star. If you let it go then, back into the night, You may see it once again Star bright.

What is this tint that in the shrill cress Will never cease to trouble us and in the fields Gives prick and praise for Beauty? And said birds that feed on berries Are pervious—and shook the snow from his thighs. I thought of nothing carefully, but of snow, and the birds. Then kissed the cup and sipped a little Though almost choked drank slowly Tickled with strange measure She faked a pretty anger I entertained the night with fantastic, empty pleasure We went as far as the ivie-bush And ivie-crowns upon our heads And carried her kiss untouched and entire Then all was fresh, inclined To wriggle and nussle and lascivious Ardent leaps. In the thickest of the wood Bid him kiss close and often And directed him to her fancie The ground had a sweeter scent, the boughs a blush One fruit, rare and rich, would outdo many together She was wild to climb the tree Nor would she be forbidden She seized the apple and put it in her bosom.

To prepare the body, aim for the translucent perfection you find in the sliced shavings of a pickled turnip. In order for this to happen, you must avoid the sun, protect the face under a paper parasol until it is bruised white like the skin of lilies. Use white soap from a blue porcelain dish for this. Restrict yourself. Eat the whites of things: tender bamboo shoots, the veins of the young iris, the clouded eye of a fish. Then wrap the body, as if it were a perfumed gift, in pieces of silk held together with invisible threads like a kite, weighing no more than a handful of crushed chrysanthemums. Light enough to float in the wind. You want the effect of koi moving through water. When the light leaves the room, twist lilacs into the lacquered hair piled high like a complicated shrine. There should be tiny bells inserted somewhere in the web of hair to imitate crickets singing in a hidden grove. Reveal the nape of the neck, your beauty spot. Hold the arrangement. If your spine slacks and you feel faint, remember the hand-picked flower set in the front alcove, which, just this morning, you so skillfully wired into place. How poised it is! Petal and leaf curving like a fan, the stem snipped and wedged into the metal base— to appear like a spontaneous accident.

The irresistible and benevolent light brushes through the angel-wing begonias, the clippings of ruddy ears for the living room. Intimate motes, debris of grounded, forlorn walks, speckle through the vitreous quality of blush. As fluid lulls turn like trout backs, azure-tipped fins oscillate in the shallows, the clear floating is dizziness. Tender events are meeting halves and wholes of affinity, the recurrence of whimsy and parallel streams flush away the blockage of malaise. Incessant gratitude, pliable kindness smolders in the husk of these sweet accumulations: abalone shells, the thoughtful carvings from friends, the stone of another’s pocket, the photo of mystified moon over water, the smiles of worn chairs. Austere hopes find pleasure in lately cherished flowers. The blooms are articulate deluge, hues of delicacy. Petals parted dim renderings, the viable imprint of the blood-hot beam of light with reformed courage. Beveling the finish to suppression, the blade of choice brings the flourish of dividing while adequately doubling worth by two. Multiplying. The luminescent burning of space. The heat is a domicile as abandoned as red roses budding their ascension from stem. The sun has its own drum contenting itself with the rose heart it takes into continual rumbling. The connection of surface and hand. The great head of dark clouds finds its own place of unraveled repercussions and disruption, elsewhere, over the tall, staunch mountains of indemnity.

Outside outside myself there is a world, he rumbled, subject to my incursions —William Carlos Williams, Paterson i. impossible. sterile extrusion the rigour of its beauty its crumpled geometry worked to defeat. light, stopped. locked in its form shuttered and windless in dry rifts, split, furrowed, mottled, creased. ii. trundling bulging from behind, its too heavy body its natural carapace shelving green, sinking the sea beneath it the difficulty piling up, rising to the surface. iii. swirling backward on blue flowering currents rolling up sudden, in spray and mist —like the turning of a page that leaves us blinded for a second— unlocked in a milky scum half hid, long on its axis growing open wounds of violet, emerald, silver. a point of astonishment. lapses of silence. air.

Without intending to hide, the imagined copperhead hid on the path ahead, unseen on bronze leaves, unheard, and a mortal likelihood at every step. This was childhood, mine, the wood’s jihad against a boy who’d intruded among monkshood, wasp, tick, and nettles haired with needles. Scrub brush abhorred him with a horde of  welts, bites, and stings, but he’d never seen a copperhead, though he’d looked hard taking, as he’d been ordered, heed. The snake wasn’t a falsehood, though, to him. Dread was his nature, and he hared through sunlight and shade, head swiveling for the copperhead he’d begun to covet, the ballyhooed killer a camouflaged godhead on which his inborn faith cohered, and his priesthood.