1630 Nature poems

Little Robin Redbreast Sat upon a tree; Up went Pussy-cat, Down went he. Down came Pussy-cat, And away Robin ran; Says little Robin Redbreast “Catch me if you can.” Little Robin Redbreast Hopped upon a wall; Pussy-cat jumped after him, And almost got a fall. Little Robin chirped and sang, And what did Pussy say? Pussy-cat said “Mew,” and Robin flew away.

I must have passed the crest a while ago And now I am going down. Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know— But the brambles were always catching the hem of my gown. All the morning I thought how proud it would be To stand there straight as a queen— Wrapped in the wind and the sun, with the world under me. But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen. It was nearly level along the beaten track And the brambles caught in my gown— But it’s no use now to think of turning back, The rest of the way will be only going down. September 1919

Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings we owned that year, it was Red— skittish and prone to explode even at fourteen years—who’d let me hold to my face his own: the massive labyrinthine caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain up the head to the eyes. He’d let me stroke his coarse chin whiskers and take his soft meaty underlip in my hands, press my man’s carnivorous kiss to his grass-nipping upper half of one, just so that I could smell the long way his breath had come from the rain and the sun, the lungs and the heart, from a world that meant no harm.

For Christopher Merrill Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land— There is no sugar in the promised land. Why must the bars turn neon now when, Love, I’m already drunk in your capitalist land? If home is found on both sides of the globe, home is of course here—and always a missed land. The hour’s come to redeem the pledge (not wholly?) in Fate’s "Long years ago we made a tryst" land. Clearly, these men were here only to destroy, a mosque now the dust of a prejudiced land. Will the Doomsayers die, bitten with envy, when springtime returns to our dismissed land? The prisons fill with the cries of children. Then how do you subsist, how do you persist, Land? “Is my love nothing for I’ve borne no children?” I’m with you, Sappho, in that anarchist land. A hurricane is born when the wings flutter ... Where will the butterfly, on my wrist, land? You made me wait for one who wasn’t even there though summer had finished in that tourist land. Do the blind hold temples close to their eyes when we steal their gods for our atheist land? Abandoned bride, Night throws down her jewels so Rome—on our descent—is an amethyst land. At the moment the heart turns terrorist, are Shahid’s arms broken, O Promised Land?

Surviving in its fragile skin, a white egret rises from the gulf of its strength. I want the lightest needle of a pine to fall on my hand, a pine with ravaged limbs. I'd stare through salt-blind eyes at a remote fragile sea.   I'd roar. I'd make the skeleton of grief. I'd roar like you, unreconciled sea.

Fill yourself up with the forsythias and when the lilacs flower, stir them in too with your blood and happiness and wretchedness, the dark ground that seems to come with you. Sluggish days. All obstacles overcome. And if you say: ending or beginning, who knows, then maybe—just maybe—the hours will carry you into June, when the roses blow.

When we finally flip it over the fireflies are out. The neighbor boy has had his stitches in so I can finally admit I think it is all fantastic: the suck of the spark plug undone, the stuck blade bent into the guard, and the sound of the hammer’s head reshaping the metal. In this our suburban Eden we’ve only a teenage Adam too dreamy to manage his motorized scythe and silly Eve leaving her coffee cups and plastic plant pots behind in the grass. Though it’s a long way from a fall, this spring’s first disaster, I did like the thin thread of red on his upper lip, and I like my mower turned over among the glowworms, a monstrous dandelion as unnatural as we are, out in a garden, with our untidy golds and our dangerous sharps.

Lines and phrases by Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Turing, and Thomas Hardy In    ...    the whitish muslin of a wide-mouthed net, in time of the breaking of nations, and in elementary arithmetic, the lichen-gray primaries keep in sufficiently close touch as to impose one part of a pattern onto another. The vibrational halo of the string figures passing from flower to flower, border to border — night-moths of measureless size, circling among the young, among the weak and old, hawk-moths at dusk hatching the war-adept in the mornings — the vibrational halo near the great wings is not the judgment-hour, only thin smoke without flame written on terrestrial things. I confess I do not believe in time. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness is an imitation game    ...    filled with the mysteries of mimicry    ...    But when a certain moth resembles a certain wasp and a deadly cipher flaps its glad green leaves like wings, what is our solution? Peace on earth and silence in the sky? I think that is not the faith and fire within us    ...    Still, I look into the depth of each breeding-cage, each floating-point form cleft into light and shade, hoping it might be so.

In the end, some are incurable. They use lint to mop up the leaking, or apply cold poultices. Creeping mess can be cleared up with pink paste or trapped in sawdust and swept. Blood can pool from their sitting and standing, but they avoid clots by regular shaking, and the sucking of sherbet. Blue blue for the sky, white for the walls, apricot for glass and woodwork. They devise a timetable by casting lots. They scrabble around in the dirt for clues. Seven is too magical a number to hold, but the soft ones like to handle it constantly. They polish its fine teak head, drive theories through its shaft and talk into the early hours about how it can resemble an ax, or sex, and how it solves, as well as creates, all conundr/ums/a. They admire their creosoted fence for protection and their own faces in its misaligned hasp. A Mrs. Milkwater puts baby brushes to soak in milk and water (and vinegar). Her sons are successful barbers. At precisely midnight the blue lights go out. The red lights stay home.

Let the light of late afternoon shine through chinks in the barn, moving up the bales as the sun moves down. Let the cricket take up chafing as a woman takes up her needles and her yarn. Let evening come. Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass. Let the stars appear and the moon disclose her silver horn. Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down. Let the shed go black inside. Let evening come. To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop in the oats, to air in the lung let evening come. Let it come, as it will, and don’t be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.