1630 Nature poems

Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung to the dark of it: the legs of the spider held the tucked wings close, held the abdomen still in the midst of calling with thrusts of phosphorescent light— When I am tired of being human, I try to remember the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them central in my mind where everything else must surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them. There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose there are grips from which even angels cannot fly. Even imagined ones.Luciferin, luciferase. When I am tired of only touching, I have my mouth to try to tell you what, in your arms, is not erased.

A fish meets another fish and lays eggs. As its fins signal to the seaweed its colors come out one after the other. Its bubbles are words meant for no one. The world rises and falls each day through the eyes of a fish.

In the cannery the porpoise soul & the shadow fins of spirit boats lie awake the hundred hooks & flying reels one harpoon & the silver fleshing in the nets the mayor is waiting/counting scales dreaming new quotas & tuna coasts (under the table blood & payrolls swim to the shores on a crucifix of oil) in the cannery the porpoise soul steals a dagger for the engines throat tuna fins etch an X on the green stone of the ships floor there are documents with worker sweat files & rolled sleeve salt a spear of sails & anchor years (lost) inside the shoulders & against the ropes (somehow) a policy gunned the waves back before the porpoise sea was born

my wife’s bare footprints on these rocks after she’s been swimming where the river has dug a small pool by the road outside Bearsville it looks like rain    no    it’s raining    should I follow these delicate marks to find her no    she’s just ten feet away    and she turns back    green bathing suit    thin legs    orange and black towel    it stops raining    her footprints going away have evaporated but of course she makes new ones heading toward me    there are certain moments you stay in even as they’re gone    like wet prints on rock or the way you cannot forget your dead friends

Brimming the trees with song they flood July, spill over into August pulsing lovecries, cicadas here—one that our cat brought me lay, legs folded neatly, on clear wings as on a shroud, green and white, fizzing now and then, but when I threw it spread wings and zagged in a wide curve into the sweetgum tree where presently its dry buzzsaw whined for some significant other to auger down into dark dense earth and gnaw at the roots of things, sans eyes, sans wings, sans song for seventeen years or so. As daylight sharpens, deer slip back into the woods. I wonder what a deer, when danger grows too bright, makes of a world whose darker, truer memories in ear and nose must solve the dazzle of our alien eyes, more surgical at stripping off its cover, at masking selves as downwind leaves. I’ve read somewhere the claim, by computer people, that pain cannot be felt until self-consciousness has been achieved, and they had programmed in that level, so they said, of artificial pain. In A. R. Luria’s book The Mind of a Mnemonist

Setting a trotline after sundown if we went far enough away in the night sometimes up out of deep water would come a secret-headed channel cat, Eyes that were still eyes in the rush of darkness, flowing feelers noncommittal and black, and hidden in the fins those rasping bone daggers, with one spiking upward on its back. We would come at daylight and find the line sag, the fishbelly gleam and the rush on the tether: to feel the swerve and the deep current which tugged at the tree roots below the river.

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.”

I stared into the valley: it was gone— wholly submerged! A vast flat sea remained, gray, with no waves, no beaches; all was one. And here and there I noticed, when I strained, the alien clamoring of small, wild voices: birds that had lost their way in that vain land. And high above, the skeletons of beeches, as if suspended, and the reveries of ruins and of the hermit’s hidden reaches. And a dog yelped and yelped, as if in fear, I knew not where nor why. Perhaps he heard strange footsteps, neither far away nor near— echoing footsteps, neither slow nor quick, alternating, eternal. Down I stared, but I saw nothing, no one, looking back. The reveries of ruins asked: “Will no one come?” The skeletons of trees inquired: “And who are you, forever on the go?” I may have seen a shadow then, an errant shadow, bearing a bundle on its head. I saw—and no more saw, in the same instant. All I could hear were the uneasy screeches of the lost birds, the yelping of the stray, and, on that sea that lacked both waves and beaches, the footsteps, neither near nor far away.

He lowered his head and darted through the grass, flushing a hen from off her nest, then zeroing in on the day-old chicks instead of the mother whose decoy trick had failed to lure him away. In the time it took for me to notice this, he'd broken the necks of two of the chicks and torn the skin from off their backs and heads. The taste of their blood had deafened him to my commands, so I went to him like an angry god and chased him away with my staff and rod, inflicting a wound also in his side for him to go on licking, to wash their blood from off his tongue with his own blood, and then I kneeled in the grass to regard his kill while the mother keened inside the woods not far away. Oh, what a mess they were with their heads snapped back and wings unhinged. I picked up the bodies like bloody socks and prayed to the god in charge of this field for my own weakness to feel this much for slaughtered chicks. For an understanding of his need to kill the most vulnerable thing, whether hungry or not.

In the green morning, before Love was destiny, The sun was king, And God was famous. The merry, the musical, The jolly, the magical, The feast, the feast of feasts, the festival Suddenly ended As the sky descended But there was only the feeling, In all the dark falling, Of fragrance and of freshness, of birth and beginning.