1630 Nature poems

Some days I am happy to be no one The shifting grasses In the May winds are miraculous enough As they ripple through the meadow of lupine The field as iridescent as a Renaissance heaven & do you see that boy with his arms raised Like one of Raphael’s angels held within This hush & this pause & the sky’s lapis expanse? That boy is my son & I am his only father Even when I am no one

When you open the door, everything falls into place— the little ferry by the wharf, fir trees and thujas. An old woman, feeding ducks, seems as old as Leni Riefenstahl. At the base of the hill, chestnut trees, not yet in full bloom, are younger—but probably as old as her films. All is wet and bright. A hedgehog or God-knows-whose-soul is rummaging in last year's leaves. Dead water and living water fill the plain. The twins Celsius and Fahrenheit are predicting spring weather—while a shadow obscures the past (just like the present). The first serene weeks scour the bridges in a peaceful corner of Europe between Wannsee and Potsdam—where much has happened, but, probably, nothing more will. For days we have been watching a ragged crow—in the garden, sometimes on the roof. The ancients would have said her stubbornness augurs something. Emerging from the wood's depths, she lights on one antenna crossbar then another, her surface bright as mercury in a thermometer's glass. But these are fever marks we are incapable of understanding. The beginning of agony? The past does not enlighten us—but still, it attempts to say something. Perhaps the crow knows more about us and about history's dirt than we do ourselves. Of what does she want to remind us? Of the black photos, the black headphones of radio operators, black signatures under documents, of the unarmed with their frozen pupils—of the prisoner's boot or the trunk of the refugee? Probably not. We will remember this anyway, though it won't make us any wiser. The bird signifies only stoicism and patience. If you ask for them, your request will be granted.

Disguised in my mouth as a swampland nailed to my teeth like a rising sun you come out in the middle of fish-scales you bleed into gourds wrapped with red ants you syncopate the air with lungs like screams from yazoo like X-rated tongues and nickel-plated fingers of a raw ghost man and somewhere stripped like a whirlwind stripped for the shrine room you sing to me through the side face of a black rooster In the morning  in the morning  in the morning all over my door like a rooster in the morning  in the morning  in the morning And studded in my kidneys like perforated hiccups inflamed in my ribs like three hoops of thunder through a screw a star-bent-bolt of quivering colons you breathe into veiled rays and scented ice holes you fire the space like a flare of embalmed pigeons and palpitate with the worms and venom and wailing flanks and somewhere inside this fever inside this patinaed pubic and camouflaged slit stooped forward on fangs in rear of your face you shake to me in the full crown of a black rooster In the morning  in the morning  in the morning Masquerading in my horn like a river eclipsed to infantries of dentures  of diving spears you enter broken mirrors through fragmented pipe spit you pull into a shadow ring of magic jelly you wear the sacrificial blood of nightfall you lift the ceiling with my tropical slush dance you slide and tremble with the reputation of an earthquake and when i kick through walls to shine like silver when i shine like brass through crust in a compound when i shine  shine  shine you wail to me in the drum call of a black rooster In the morning  in the morning  in the morning gonna kill me a rooster in the morning early in the morning way down in the morning before the sun passes by in the morning  in the morning  in the morning In the morning when the deep sea goes through a dog's bite and you spit on the tip of your long knife In the morning in the morning when peroxide falls on a bed of broken glass and the sun rises like a polyester ball of menses in the morning gonna firedance in the petro in the morning turn loose the blues in the funky jungle in the morning I said when you see the morning coming like a two-headed twister let it blow  let it blow in the morning  in the morning all swollen up like an ocean in the morning early in the morning before the cream dries in the bushes in the morning when you hear the rooster cry cry rooster cry in the morning  in the morning I said disguised in my mouth like a swampland nailed to my teeth like a rising sun you come out in the middle of fish-scales you bleed into gourds wrapped with red ants you syncopate the air with lungs like screams from yazoo like X-rated tongues and nickel-plated fingers of a raw ghost man and somewhere stripped like a whirlwind stripped for the shrine room you sing to me through the side face of a black rooster In the morning  in the morning  in the morning

Colorado turns Kyoto in a shower, mist in the pines so thick the crows delight (or seem to), winging in obscurity. The ineffectual panic of a squirrel who chattered at my passing gave me pause to watch his Ponderosa come and go— long needles scratching cloud. I’d summited but knew it only by the wildflower meadow, the muted harebells, paintbrush, gentian, scattered among the locoweed and sage. Today my grief abated like water soaking underground, its scar a little path of twigs and needles winding ahead of me downhill to the next bend. Today I let the rain soak through my shirt and was unharmed.

A blast off the Atlantic snaps a flag in the Firth of Clyde, while thirty leagues away, the same synoptic wind surges across this hillside honeycombed with mineshafts, sounding the unstopped slots of a "G" harmonica left to dry on the kitchen sill. Snow charges a sky in which the sun swims and glimmers like a groat, a turbulent space where owls hunt by day but nothing stands for long—bereft of circumstance—beyond the standing stones of Long Meg and Her Daughters. Through the night, like a stoker on a fast express—the Hyperion on its Edinburgh run— you hoy buckets of coal on the grate, only to see its flames drawn up the chimney, getting more heat from hoying the fuel than from its burning. As a barnacle goose swims against the dark, uttering its terse honk, you pull your favorite word,duvet, close about your head. Tomorrow, bailiffs may take everything not hammered down.

Leave go my hands, let me catch breath and see; Let the dew-fall drench either side of me; Clear apple-leaves are soft upon that moon Seen sidelong like a blossom in the tree; And God, ah God, that day should be so soon. The grass is thick and cool, it lets us lie. Kissed upon either cheek and either eye, I turn to thee as some green afternoon Turns toward sunset, and is loth to die; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Lie closer, lean your face upon my side, Feel where the dew fell that has hardly dried, Hear how the blood beats that went nigh to swoon; The pleasure lives there when the sense has died, Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. O my fair lord, I charge you leave me this: It is not sweeter than a foolish kiss? Nay take it then, my flower, my first in June, My rose, so like a tender mouth it is: Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Love, till dawn sunder night from day with fire Dividing my delight and my desire, The crescent life and love the plenilune, Love me though dusk begin and dark retire; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Ah, my heart fails, my blood draws back; I know, When life runs over, life is near to go; And with the slain of love love’s ways are strewn, And with their blood, if love will have it so; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Ah, do thy will now; slay me if thou wilt; There is no building now the walls are built, No quarrying now the corner-stone is hewn, No drinking now the vine’s whole blood is spilt; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Nay, slay me now; nay, for I will be slain; Pluck thy red pleasure from the teeth of pain, Break down thy vine ere yet grape-gatherers prune, Slay me ere day can slay desire again; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Yea, with thy sweet lips, with thy sweet sword; yea Take life and all, for I will die, I say; Love, I gave love, is life a better boon? For sweet night’s sake I will not live till day; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Nay, I will sleep then only; nay, but go. Ah sweet, too sweet to me, my sweet, I know Love, sleep, and death go to the sweet same tune; Hold my hair fast, and kiss me through it soon. Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.

for Susan Koethe This is the life I wanted, and could never see. For almost twenty years I thought that it was enough: That real happiness was either unreal, or lost, or endless, And that remembrance was as close to it as I could ever come. And I believed that deep in the past, buried in my heart Beyond the depth of sight, there was a kingdom of peace. And so I never imagined that when peace would finally come It would be on a summer evening, a few blocks away from home In a small suburban park, with some children playing aimlessly In an endless light, and a lake shining in the distance. Eventually, sometime around the middle of your life, There’s a moment when the first imagination begins to wane. The future that had always seemed so limitless dissolves, And the dreams that used to seem so real float up and fade. The years accumulate; but they start to take on a mild, Human tone beyond imagination, like the sound the heart makes Pouring into the past its hymns of adoration and regret. And then gradually the moments quicken into life, Vibrant with possibility, sovereign, dense, serene; And then the park is empty and the years are still. I think the saddest memory is of a kind of light, A kind of twilight, that seemed to permeate the air For a few years after I’d grown up and gone away from home. It was limitless and free. And of course I was going to change, But freedom means that only aspects ever really change, And that as the past recedes and the future floats away You turn into what you are. And so I stayed basically the same As what I’d always been, while the blond light in the trees Became part of my memory, and my voice took on the accents Of a mind infatuated with the rhetoric of farewell. And now that disembodied grief has gone away. It was a flickering, literary kind of sadness, The suspension of a life between two other lives Of continual remembrance, between two worlds In which there’s too much solitude, too much disdain. But the sadness that I felt was real sadness, And this elation now a real tremor as the deepening Shadows lengthen upon the lake. This calm is real, But how much of the real past can it absorb? How far into the future can this peace extend? I love the way the light falls over the suburbs Late on these summer evenings, as the buried minds Stir in their graves, the hearts swell in the warm earth And the soul settles from the air into its human home. This is where the prodigal began, and now his day is ending In a great dream of contentment, where all night long The children sleep within tomorrow’s peaceful arms And the past is still, and suddenly we turn around and smile At the memory of a vast, inchoate dream of happiness, Now that we know that none of it is ever going to be. Don’t you remember how free the future seemed When it was all imagination? It was a beautiful park Where the sky was a page of water, and when we looked up, There were our own faces, shimmering in the clear air. And I know that this life is the only real form of happiness, But sometimes in its midst I can hear the dense, stifled sob Of the unreal one we might have known, and when that ends And my eyes are filled with tears, time seems to have stopped And we are alone in the park where it is almost twenty years ago And the future is still an immense, open dream.

In the spring time the stars began looking for him By summer time they had found him By autumn time they had wounded him so that the orange and red of his blood began to leak from the sky onto the leaves of the trees By winter time they had slain him so that his white fat began to melt and drip falling as snow all over the land And then he would begin to rise again first as sap in the trees stretching higher and higher until his back ached but knowing he would not stop until his black fur was hidden deep among the unborn behind the dark wall of the night sky

And now the green household is dark. The half-moon completely is shining On the earth-lighted tops of the trees. To be dead, a house must be still. The floor and the walls wave me slowly; I am deep in them over my head. The needles and pine cones about me Are full of small birds at their roundest, Their fists without mercy gripping Hard down through the tree to the roots To sing back at light when they feel it. We lie here like angels in bodies, My brothers and I, one dead, The other asleep from much living, In mid-air huddled beside me. Dark climbed to us here as we climbed Up the nails I have hammered all day Through the sprained, comic rungs of the ladder Of broom handles, crate slats, and laths Foot by foot up the trunk to the branches Where we came out at last over lakes Of leaves, of fields disencumbered of earth That move with the moves of the spirit. Each nail that sustains us I set here; Each nail in the house is now steadied By my dead brother’s huge, freckled hand. Through the years, he has pointed his hammer Up into these limbs, and told us That we must ascend, and all lie here. Step after step he has brought me, Embracing the trunk as his body, Shaking its limbs with my heartbeat, Till the pine cones danced without wind And fell from the branches like apples. In the arm-slender forks of our dwelling I breathe my live brother’s light hair. The blanket around us becomes As solid as stone, and it sways. With all my heart, I close The blue, timeless eye of my mind. Wind springs, as my dead brother smiles And touches the tree at the root; A shudder of joy runs up The trunk; the needles tingle; One bird uncontrollably cries. The wind changes round, and I stir Within another’s life. Whose life? Who is dead? Whose presence is living? When may I fall strangely to earth, Who am nailed to this branch by a spirit? Can two bodies make up a third? To sing, must I feel the world’s light? My green, graceful bones fill the air With sleeping birds. Alone, alone And with them I move gently. I move at the heart of the world.

I remember a house where all were good To me, God knows, deserving no such thing: Comforting smell breathed at very entering, Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood. That cordial air made those kind people a hood All over, as a bevy of eggs the mothering wing Will, or mild nights the new morsels of Spring: Why, it seemed of course; seemed of right it should. Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales, All the air things wear that build this world of Wales; Only the inmate does not correspond: God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales, Complete thy creature dear O where it fails, Being mighty a master, being a father and fond.