1630 Nature poems

Three days later, Suljic was finally given a drink of water and marched with a dozen other men onto a small livery truck, one of two, fenced along each side by wooden planks, the back left open to give a clear shot to the automatic weapon poking out the window of the red sedan that followed, the squat nose trained on them, ridiculously, as if they'd any thought of hopping off a moving truck. Suljic peered vacantly through the slats. He'd missed the yellow flowers of Spring and by now saw a landscape taken over by Summer, the grasses closing behind them as they veered from the road and lurched across cow paths. They drove to the center of a wide field and stopped. Old sweat, without the breeze of movement, prickled in the heat. A metal smell drifted, an untended apple grove baked on a hill, and the weeds droned, motory with bees. But Suljic noticed none of these, fixed instead on the gaps in the field where bodies, all dead, matted down the wild carrot and chicory, their khakis splotched darkly, like a fawn's dappled haunches obscuring them. The men clambered down into the tall grass and lined up at gunpoint. Suljic was sure the last good thing he'd ever see would be the apple branches drooping with fruit, but the man beside him grabbed his hand, and looked him in the face, as if Suljic, just a bricklayer, had any assurances to give. He squeezed the hand back, hard, and felt a scab crossing the man's knuckles. He saw, too, a thin scar worrying the arch of his left eyebrow, much older, perhaps from a fall as a child from a ladder picking fruit. His hand was like a clump of mortar, and three nights without sleep had webbed his eyes red. And Suljic suddenly stuttered to ask his name, what town was he from, his job—anything—but there came the crackle, like sometimes thunder, undecided whether to begin, that starts, stalls, then trips over itself, the sound crinkling from one end of the sky to the other. The sound took possession of his face until it, too, crinkled, his grip pulsed, and he fell forward. Suljic winced in the tackle of bodies, and splayed down in the dirt flattening himself like a beetle, not hurt in any new way, not yet convinced he wasn't dead and didn't feel it. He heard the click of fresh clips sliding into place, and shut his eyes lightly, sure someone had seen he wasn't shot and would come finish it. But no one came. Another truck rolled up. The men climbed down, and lined up, docilely. He recognized, solely by rhythm, a prayer, cut off by the crackle, the hush of crickets, the soft whump of bodies folding at the knees and knocked by bullets shoulder first into the grass. No one yelled. No one tried to run. Another truck, another group, falling like a succession of bricks sliding off a hod. Suljic finally pissed where he lay, and blended in all the better with the others. The noise stopped, and he cracked his eyes enough to see, across the backs like bleeding hills, a man strolling along the scatter of bodies with a pistol, putting a slug into the skull of anyone that still twitched or mumbled. Then came the snort and low-pitched rumble of diesel engines as two backhoes dug a trench along the margin of all the collapsed bodies. Impossibly, the crackling started anew, and when darkness finally settled, the squads continued in what light the backhoes' headlights threw. Perhaps the shooting was over long before the sound left him, the crackle to his eardrums was like the rolling of a boat to his limbs echoing long after he'd reached dry ground. The soldiers left. Still he didn't move, but eased his eyes full open. The moon above the orchard was shrinking higher, its light glossing the awkward pale forms that stubbled the dry weeds, glinting off teeth and eyes. He scuttled from beneath the arms and legs flopped sleepingly over his own, as though by drunkards or lovers, and rose like a foal to his numb feet, seeing throughout the field no man not touched by three dead others. He stood for a moment, trying to guess, even roughly, their number, multiplying bodies per square yard, but the math was too much, the count too huge. He stared at the faces beside him in the grass, like a man leaving something he knew he would someday have to return to, looking for the landmarks that would guide him— the crooked teeth, the welted cheek, the pale eyes eclipsed by half-shut lids, lolling upward, inward, swollen as though with weeping, blood from an unseen hole glistering down a chin line, crusting on lips. How could he explain his life, what could he say to those who weren't here to see, to the mothers and wives who'd swear for years their men were still alive, somewhere, the bodies never found, bulldozed into clay— would he tell them how he tiptoed, unable to avoid stepping on hands and ankles, or how the tears like a secret he'd harbored through three years of siege shook loose, and how he let them, no longer afraid of being found out and cut down by gunfire, or how he ran anyway, when he reached the open, quick as his bum leg would let him, without a look back at the faces turned like gourds in the dark mire.

Kurosawa was a moralist. It is said he took and gently bent Akutagawa’s grove. Akutagawa was trying to show us something. It is said he wore cold wet gloves when he wrote.

“Are you happy?” That’s a good place to start, or maybe, “Do you think you’re happy?” with its more negative tone. Sometimes you’re walking, sometimes falling. That’s part of the problem too, but not all of the problem. Flowers out the window or on the windowsill, and so someone brought flowers. We spend a long time interested in which way the car would best go in the driveway. Is that the beginning of an answer? Some way to say who we are? Well, it brings us up to now, at any rate, as the limitations of structure, which is the way we need for it to be. Invent some muses and invoke them, or save them for the yard, some animus to get us going. And what was it Michael said yesterday? That the committee to do all these good things has an agenda to do all these other things as well, that we decide are less good in our estimation, so then we have this difficulty. It just gets to you sometimes. We have a table of red apples and a table of green apples, and someone asks you about apples, but that’s too general, you think, as you’ve made several distinctions to get to this place of two tables, two colors. How can that be an answer to anything? Or we can play the forgetting game, how, for twenty years, my mother would answer for her forgetfulness by saying it was Old-Timer’s Disease, until she forgot that too. On the television, a truck passes left to right, in stereo. Outside, a garbage truck passes right to left. They intersect. And so the world continues around two corners. The table gets turned over, with several people standing around seemingly not sure of what comes next. Look at them politely as you can, they’re beginners too. And they say the right question is far more difficult to get to than the right answer. It sounds good, anyway, in the way other people’s lives are a form of distance, something you can look at, like landscape, until your own starts to look that way as well. Looking back at the alternatives, we never had children or we had more children. And what were their names? As the living room parts into halls and ridges, where we spend the afternoon imagining a plant, a filing cabinet or two...because some of these questions you have with others, and some you have only with yourself.

“Ghosts are people who think they’re ghosts,” my daughter Natalie said, starting off the period we will refer to later as A Little Bit Further Along. Since then (which was last night, November 3rd, 2009), I’ve been thinking about where I am more, as a kind of goal, and somewhat less about where I’m not. It’s a pleasure to be where one is, given that someone isn’t somewhere lethal. This is Pleasure One. And now this is Pleasure Two, thinking about it, so that this place, which was Place One, and a pleasure, as we were there where we were and it was not a lethal place, but a place where we were, is now this place again as we’re here thinking about it, like America or a popsicle. “Open the house and the house is empty,” Natalie also said, meaning her dollhouse, as she’s seven, but when she said it, I had this vision of all of us suddenly disappearing, maybe thinking ourselves ghosts, even, or getting somewhere, out and around her bedroom and then down the hall and stairs. I’ll tell you how it happened. Natalie and I were looking out the window at the backyard, and she asked me if I liked our house. It’s a theme with her. The other night she asked me if I liked life. I said, “Yeah, a lot.” And she looked at me a second and then said, “Me too.” You don’t hear that every day, I think, until the accumulations begin to remind me of every day: Carla, who donated a kidney to her brother-in-law (Robin’s uncle), has just been diagnosed with cancer, two months later. She sends hopeful updates from the hospital, on Facebook. Like fountains, the footnotes go on. My footnote or yours. The big questions can’t be decided in this way. They demand coins or laws. And this is much too important to be a big question.

It appears that we’re living (which isn’t always the case), depending on how one defines such things, in a “now you see it / now you see it” kind of way. We can say we’re working on our age, as well, listening to Bob Dylan songs where people can age in whatever direction supports the theme. “Too bad life doesn’t get themes,” Robin says, and yes, that’s right, and then we can all go do whatever it was we were going to do anyway. “It’s either that, or pay off the kidnapper,” as Neil Young had it, back in the mid-70s. There’s always an analogue, and someone to tell us about it, how, no matter how fast you run, you can’t run fast enough to get away from yourself. You could even call it a theme. For instance, I was the first one to an eighteen-wheeler accident on the highway once, in the early 90s. I didn’t know what I was going to find. It was just tossed there on its side, across both lanes. So I got out of the car and walked around to the front, only to see the driver standing inside the cab that was resting on the driver-side door. He was simply standing there behind the glass, parallel with the dashboard, a little blood on his forehead, looking as lost as I felt, looking back at him. All his things (magazines and maps and cigarettes and pens and snacks) in a little pile at his feet. When I left, a guy was hitting the windshield with a baseball bat. You go to the room, and the place you like to sit is missing. This is an opportunity to trust, I suppose, or perhaps for blind panic, if one were to consider this a metaphor for something. But say it’s not, say there are no such things as metaphors for a moment, and where does that get you? Presently, it gets me to a row of green and yellow plastic chairs, those 1950s-looking ones I imagine Kenton would like to collect. They’re joined together by shiny metal clasps, chrome, and the whole thing is full of sunlight through the plate glass window. It’s the kind of scene I think of as lickable, how everything looks like cheerful candy, and I wonder if there might be a way to be there or here without a beginning, or without an ending, or if perhaps there might be a concept for no middle.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.

Peace fell on the dim lands a sort of abstraction The metronome counted one petal after another So the petals fell as or in some music This song needs no breath just an apparition With a mouth open and eyes and eyes The wet smear of eyes beneath pink Petals in excess of the window frame’s bright Yellow square and yes spring gathers right now The moisture from my breath up into clouds Whose downpour makes of the plum tree in blossom A diminishing crowd for which the natural symbol Refuses to exist a plain blue gem on a pin Faces glowing within the stone like flowers Within the stone like flaws the mind turns inward Turns inward its tangle of wet black boughs A knot pulled tight so tight it ceases to be A knot yes I’ll say it a knot that becomes angelic Another example everywhere seen of the angelic Gears toothless and without cogs a sort of mist That turns the other gear by drifting through it As just now through my eye drifts that storm Battered tree whose broken-petal pocked bark Asks of me a question my mouth can’t speak Like a river that dives underground just there There where the animals thirst the most A desert fox say or say a toad or let’s speak more simply About a plum which bursts through its own explosion Into being and hangs there so ponderously As if as if not concerned with innocence or Gravity or other acute angles as they evaporate Into this poem O no am I speaking again again about dim lands these dim dim lands of of peace

In beauty-bright and such it was like Blake’s lily and though an angel he looked absurd dragging a lily out of a beauty-bright store wrapped in tissue with a petal drooping, nor was it useless—you who know it know how useful it is—and how he would be dead in a minute if he were to lose it though how do you lose a lily?His lily was white and he had a foolish smile there holding it up like a candelabrum in his right hand facing the mirror in the hall nor had the endless centuries started yet nor was there one thorn between his small house and the beauty-bright store.

Chemicals ripen the citrus; There are rattlesnakes in the mountains, And on the shoreline Hygiene, inhuman caution. Beef in cellophane Tall as giraffes, The orange-rancher’s daughters Crop their own groves, mistrustful. Perpetual summer seems Precarious on the littoral. We drive Inland to prove The risk we sense. At once Winter claps-to like a shutter High over the Ojai valley, and discloses A double crisis, Winter and Drought. Ranges on mountain-ranges, Empty, unwatered, crumbling, Hot colours come at the eye. It is too cold For picnics at the trestle-tables. Claypit Yellow burns on the distance. The phantom walks Everywhere, of intolerable heat. At Ventucopa, elevation Two-eight-nine-six, the water hydrant frozen, Deserted or broken settlements, Gasoline stations closed and boarded. By nightfall, to the snows; And over the mile on tilted Mile of the mountain park The bright cars hazarded.

Pale, then enkindled, light advancing, emblazoning summits of palm and pine, the dew lingering, scripture of scintillas. Soon the roar of mowers cropping the already short grass of lawns, men with long-nozzled cylinders of pesticide poking at weeds, at moss in cracks of cement, and louder roar of helicopters off to spray vineyards where braceros try to hold their breath, and in the distance, bulldozers, excavators, babel of destructive construction. Banded by deep oakshadow, airy shadow of eucalyptus, miner’s lettuce, tender, untasted, and other grass, unmown, luxuriant, no green more brilliant. Fragile paradise. .   .   .   . At day’s end the whole sky, vast, unstinting, flooded with transparent mauve, tint of wisteria, cloudless over the malls, the industrial parks, the homes with the lights going on, the homeless arranging their bundles. .   .   .   . Who can utter the poignance of all that is constantly threatened, invaded, expended and constantly nevertheless persists in beauty, tranquil as this young moon just risen and slowly drinking light from the vanished sun. Who can utter the praise of such generosity or the shame?