1630 Nature poems

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.

A good way to fall in love is to turn off the headlights and drive very fast down dark roads. Another way to fall in love is to say they are only mints and swallow them with a strong drink. Then it is autumn in the body. Your hands are cold. Then it is winter and we are still at war. The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear about how we live in a beautiful country. Snow sifts from the clouds into your drink. It doesn’t matter about the war. A good way to fall in love is to close up the garage and turn the engine on, then down you’ll fall through lovely mists as a body might fall early one morning from a high window into love. Love, the broken glass. Love, the scissors and the water basin. A good way to fall is with a rope to catch you. A good way is with something to drink to help you march forward. The gold-haired girl says,