1630 Nature poems

The baby sleeps. Sunlight plays upon my lap, through doily leaves a black lab comes, a scotty goes, the day wears on, the baby wakes. The good birds sing, invisible or seldom seen, in hidden kingdoms, grateful for the in- between. The baby sleeps. Elsewhere the Queen rolls by on gusts of cheer — ladies wave and bless her reign. The baby frets. The baby feeds. The end of lunch, a daytime moon. The leaves are lightly tinkered with. It’s spring? No, autumn? Afternoon? We’ve sat so long, we’ve walked so far. The woods in shade, the woods in sun, the singing birds, the noble trees. The child is grown. The child is gone. The black lab comes, his circuit done. His mistress coils his scarlet lead.

Snow and after, each bidding and restlessness turns the goat’s heart fallow: long hours of ice and bluster: asymmetry of wind. Say every goat has in its heart a field, and each field, a goat: the slumber of muscle and grass is still a different elegy. Every heart writes a different letter of winter to its cold. Icicles on sheet metal, bucket frozen in the well. Once there was no language for the weather, just The sky is low and birdless; or The sky is a box of wings.

So populous the region That from the next region The crowing of children, barking of cars could be heard, So that a continuous linkage Of sounds of living ran In the limber air, District to district, Woodlake to Montclair, Freestone to Smithfield, and one child’s cry Was not concealed from any trade route, Or passer by, Or upstairs island of thought withdrawn, Or basement of submerged magnificence. One crow Welkened the evening sky, Bark blasted the dark, Like an assertion in a time of assent, Or an increase to astonishment. June 1958

The trade-wind jingles the rings in the nets around the racks by the docks on Indian River. It is the same jingle of the water among roots under the banks of the palmettoes, It is the same jingle of the red-bird breasting the orange-treesout of the cedars. Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.

Benegal, 1779-1859 The fields flame with it, endless, blue as cobra poison. It has entered our blood and pulses up our veins like night. There is no other color. The planter’s whip splits open the flesh of our faces, a blue liquid light trickles through the fingers. Blue dyes the lungs when we breathe. Only the obstinate eyes refuse to forget where once the rice parted the earth’s moist skin and pushed up reed by reed, green, then rippled gold like the Arhiyal’s waves. Stitched into our eyelids, the broken dark, the torches of the planter’s men, fire walling like a tidal wave over our huts, ripe charred grain that smelled like flesh. And the wind screaming in the voices of women dragged to the plantation, feet, hair, torn breasts. In the worksheds, we dip our hands, their violent forever blue, in the dye, pack it in great embossed chests for the East India Company. Our ankles gleam thin blue from the chains. After that night many of the women killed themselves. Drowning was the easiest. Sometimes the Arhiyal gave us back the naked, swollen bodies, the faces eaten by fish. We hold on to red, the color of their saris, the marriage mark on their foreheads, we hold it carefully inside our blue skulls, like a man in the cold Paush night holds in his cupped palms a spark, its welcome scorch, feeds it his foggy breath till he can set it down in the right place, to blaze up and burst like the hot heart of a star over the whole horizon, a burning so beautiful you want it to never end. Note Paush: name of a winter month in the Bengali calendar The planting of indigo was forced on the farmers of Bengal, India, by the British, who exported it as a cash crop for almost a hundred years until the peasant uprising of I860, when the plantations were destroyed.

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the first trees were felled and sailed in, wrecked, then slept an age in the northern sun, blackening to iron                    were found by horsemen leading their horses and raised as cloud’s axles, rafters of night, a god’s gates were passed through, seen from miles off, rolled the sun and moon along their lintels, rooted, put out leaves                     for a second time creaked, tasted the rain, held the wind to their hearts while the horsemen streamed like their horses’ manes into the dark, their fires black smudge in the subsoil, their bridles of gold underground lived long, grew great were a second time felled, dressed                   were sharpened to stakes and raised as a fort by farmers who’d followed their ploughs to the treeline for fuel to bake the pots their ashes were buried in with a scattering of grain like stars                 each small clay heaven still hangs in the earth were overgrown, steered clear of called dragon’s ribs devil’s cot                 were nested among, rotted down beside harbored foxglove, eggshell owl pellet, primrose, honeycomb were glazed, split put out buds of malachite, blossoms of salt, grew again, put out small translucent fruits named by the women who prized them teardrops, ice apples, clarities were offered bread, dolls of woven grass, plaits of hair, coins with the obverse ground smooth, beads of  turquoise twisted, straightened, filled with rooks, held again the wind to their hearts, creaked, scraped off the sunlight’s scales with their leaves, were a grove, grew manes of lichen, were murmured under, gave counsel on still nights of open doorways the dead came through on horseback or shouldering flails or bearing chimes of ice apples                       gave shelter were felled for it, their roots ripped up by a legion’s engineers and left like brainstems rucked on the earth were timber but the pit saws snarled in their rings of iron broke teeth on the flints that welted their sapwood were good for nothing, stacked, fired, marched away from, sucked up the flames, hissed, smoked, glowed blood- black, were tempered, twice- forged                     bided on site as battle-stain, in story as Head Wood lay half-buried, grown over, still hot were stumbled upon by navigators, hit with hammers and rang until they were made lock gates to slam shut on the slow wet grew green, slime- faced, knew runoff, weird particulates, held fast against drizzle’s tonnage, the nudge and bonk of a bloater        were left stinking when the water died stood strange in currents of deep grass, open wide flexed, hungered once more for the light, bulged, branched, rived out of their lacquer, unfurled leaves of oilskin, shook down clots of blossom            lived long, grew great weren’t felled but walled in, roofed over, giving span to a farmhouse, hanging a hall from their outstretch, bracing floor after floor on their inosculating joists, which sang to a barefoot tread and were called home of shadows             heart of the wind Lamanby

Toys and rose               The zoo body zigzags I think fish too but I'm a polite social being, I'm a Ladle Lady or purple and blue I write green letters and gold editorials for the Krystal Oxygen Company I have one hip as far as I can see, that I see as I write say white tee-shirts upsidedown turn em around & put them on your muscles my angels or a semi-colon is blue window to me is that a haiku? I fly over San Diego in some one or another real despair and ask you to comfort me. You more or less do, you aren't even here my best me my worldly me my taste of spring my continuance my comfort will you comfort me? I offer you my heart over Tucson I can't use it take it to comfort me free me be it take it take it to be it which apparently you don't or take you help provide me it I think, that happens among true people, that poem I was writing no good poem but Moment framed the Pleiades The garnets ring more beautiful the longer you are waiting for me in them, where Deity makes me friendly there. But who put on all the tee-shirts in Hunter's Point? Well we're all good boys my son said so. A semi-colon is a semi-precious garnet cluster telegram; what we love are such depths between all the messages. Pass the salt; Ladies of the Tang, bubble of night; this book about Harry Truman is wonderful. I see the Gulf Moon Rising every night. I'm familiar with the zonked starfish. I've the sheen on under the fire-escape railing all streetlight-lit. The hollow suddenly appeared to enlarge and fill with a bright light. Wild with the taste of wine it does not remember the despair of an hour ago, which was true that is of a true woman. She was somehow hating her position on the round earth in the dusky sky on a harsh Sunday. On the ground forgotten flowerlike firmaments. She addressed in uneloquent hatred SMUG LIFE the one who soothes one's foolishness the Great Face Construct who loves you for your kinks child anyway, the Guru God: Oh I will come back a knockout tomorrow Useless to you! You're not it you smug face I'm not doing your yoga not wearing Your moondrops using your cream Rinse letting you fuck me Exquisite Like I was one of the Ones With Brains Too! Intelligence in panties with peekaboo holes— No I'm coming back raw I'm getting drenched in the rain It's rain and it's wet I'm soaked I'm Chilled and I'm coughing the air's raw To my throat, which is raw from Coughing, coughing so strong Coughing and laughing So strong from killing you! Etc. She didn't kill nothing. & I don't get to share no secrets with the stars. I make chow. I contemplate semi-colons. I despair as a mother. I scream at that kid I'm gonna crack open your big walnut if you don't go to sleep. Theories of grace, that it implies no surprise no shock. Ukrainians sudden on Sunday speaking Ukrainian, the cross not Christian but Gracious and when I want to cry or cough violently it must diffuse back into my embassy; hard, that takes hard. And if it weren't for you . . . not you smug life face, but real you. Please play cribbage. Pass the salt. Think of a garnet-black cabbage, a Ukrainian is selling it on 7th Street in honor of our marriage. A Spanish fan opens in my abdomen I have Spanish dancers in my stomach they're my arching striving in dance where it's black red flowers darken to be huge pleasuring the severe, tried Angel who meets transition, transport, as abruptly as necessary for everyone's are apt Says the Unassuming Graceful Whose down-hip-ness Is that window The dancers' sensuous flaw That admits Spring, Contingent upon our personality Spring is for the worldly just like the HaHa Room Just like dearest rockbottom suddenly gone buoyant To be black geese to be strenuous dancers is not to dignify a passion but to grip it. Not saints but always pupils pupils dilated fully black in full achievement of gut-feeling. Joy.

Begin in a cave. Listen to the floor boil with rodents, insects. Weep for the pups that have fallen. Later, you’ll fly the narrow passages of those bones, but for now — open your mouth, out will fly names like Pipistrelle, Desmodus, Tadarida. Then, listen for a frequency lower than the seep of water, higher than an ice planet hibernating beyond a glacier of Time. Visit op shops. Hide in their closets. Breathe in the scales and dust of clothes left hanging. To the underwear and to the crumbled black silks — well, give them your imagination and plenty of line, also a night of gentle wind. By now your fingers should have touched petals open. You should have been dreaming each night of anthers and of giving to their furred beauty your nectar-loving tongue. But also, your tongue should have been practising the cold of a slippery, frog-filled pond. Go down on your elbows and knees. You’ll need a spieliologist’s desire for rebirth and a miner’s paranoia of gases — but try to find within yourself the scent of a bat-loving flower. Read books on pogroms. Never trust an owl. Its face is the biography of propaganda. Never trust a hawk. See its solutions in the fur and bones of regurgitated pellets. And have you considered the smoke yet from a moving train? You can start half an hour before sunset, but make sure the journey is long, uninterrupted and that you never discover the faces of those Trans-Siberian exiles. Spend time in the folds of curtains. Seek out boarding-school cloakrooms. Practise the gymnastics of web umbrellas. Are you floating yet, thought-light, without a keel on your breastbone? Then, meditate on your bones as piccolos, on mastering the thermals beyond the tremolo; reverberations beyond the lexical. Become adept at describing the spectacles of the echo — but don’t watch dark clouds passing across the moon. This may lead you to fetishes and cults that worship false gods by lapping up bowls of blood from a tomb. Practise echo-locating aerodromes, stamens. Send out rippling octaves into the fossils of dank caves — then edit these soundtracks with a metronome of dripping rocks, heartbeats and with a continuous, high-scaled wondering about the evolution of your own mind. But look, I must tell you — these instructions are no manual. Months of practice may still only win you appreciation of the acoustical moth, hatred of the hawk and owl. You may need to observe further the floating black host through the hills.

for Kenward Elmslie Down in the boondocks rhematic sinsigns multiply jug jug to hungry ghosts, bursting open pearly gates. “Aint no grace, aint no guilt, popcorn twiddle, come full tilt” handy pathfinders whoop at no-restriction hurdles : Da woid ob sin aint dare at all, not in giggles nor reddening toes no think blink no tattle no buckle high dick fun at the fair. Vestigial legisigns just don’t operate, healty wisps entwining and buzzing, hinterland busy with fresh huggermugger. Replica points: you point your toes in fact it’s toes we fluffily toss. Secret moon lotion rub by reedy pool. “They call me Googoo” I said, I….. All upsurge, hot tip green informants signify the trees are barking “cheeze it, the cops.” Trees tease, twinkle. That need being versed in country things: guiltless I milked the cow, slaughtered chicken, swam with snakes, unjust barefoot hobbledehoy ahoy.