1630 Nature poems

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.

unwavering noon, self-minus sun flake on the levels of gold there are names for these things: rose, brick, plate glass the annunciation of the sparrow a gene for anxiety add hope, fear, greed, desire no rest but the shade to which a sun implodes perhaps on other worlds others walk streets muse on the weather psyches built, say, on a double sun of unwavering noon the balm of such congruence • thick, white, stick bicyclists painted on the esplanade to Chambers glinting Jersey cars helicopter blades under a ledge of cloud alien first descent past the Trade Towers drifting in on the flyway to LaGuardia landscape, local, locale: the man-made made man trying to open to something like days' unraveling waves • blue pulled toward fire out toward the skyscraper lights ancient mausoleums upheavals from personal terror dark pier jut into dark water turquoise, indigo, aqua, lapis; under the molten, under the bruise of night blood in your lips as a man I violated the boundary of your mouth I say this because in the phantasmagoria I was woman and man in another story you turn men to stone though here, out of narrative, poignant at Morton Street against the twilight • incomprehensible rain under sun heap-leached haze-gold fused into evening water's green-grey dense pliance shadowed face that bends to the shadows to drink and be salvaged tiered buildings like vast Titanics yellow truck-trailer's anonymous corpse conjoined to the numberless a boy swept from the rocks at the Verrazano stanchion tomb cold draining past Liberty it need not cohere but how could it not? without context, for which all are accountable this is for you of the future: one was here who is gone, into the eigen levels

It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or so of the next closest thing to water to the touch, or it could just as easily be a shaft of  wood crumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm. But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure of this town, it is the flash that arrives and leaves at nearly the same moment. It’s what I want to be in this moment, in this doorway, because much as I’d love to be the silk-shimmer against the curve of anyone’s arm, as brutal and impeccable as it’d be to soar from a crossbow with a whistle and have a man switch off upon my arrival, it is nothing compared to that moment when I eat the dark, draw shadows in quick strokes across wall and start a tongue counting down to thunder. That counting that says, I am this far. I am this close.

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year; There are four seasons in the mind of man: He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear Takes in all beauty with an easy span: He has his Summer, when luxuriously Spring's honied cud of youthful thought he loves To ruminate, and by such dreaming high Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings He furleth close; contented so to look On mists in idleness—to let fair things Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook. He has his Winter too of pale misfeature, Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

I bring you a hummingbird’s nest, woven from seed-down, thistle head, bound with lichen and spidersilk, shaped by a mother who presses her breast against the cup, uses her rump, chin, the curve of her wing, who stomps her claws on the base to check it’s windproof under this leaf porch. The male gone, she works alone, hurrying back and forth thirty times an hour, before the eggs come. She lays them in a home small as a nutshell, the rim turned in, the sides pliant so they’ll stretch as the chicks grow. Little mother, I’ve read your file filled with letters to the mairie, begging for a place where we could live together. I know now how hard you fought the powers, like a jeweled dart stabbing at their door, before you fell prey to the jungle mantis. Instead of flowers, I leave you this nest on your grave, in case you make it from your migration — only a wisp of feathers, no flesh left on your bones.

The last full moon of February stalks the fields; barbed wire casts a shadow. Rising slowly, a beam moved toward the west stealthily changing position until now, in the small hours, across the snow it advances on my pillow to wake me, not rudely like the sun but with the cocked gun of silence. I am alone in a vast room where a vain woman once slept. The moon, in pale buckskins, crouches on guard beside her bed. Slowly the light wanes, the snow will melt and all the fences thrum in the spring breeze but not until that sleeper, trapped in my body, turns and turns.

Early December, dusk, and the sky slips down the rungs of its blue ladder into indigo. A late-quarter moon hangs in the air above the ridge like a broken plate and shines on us all, on the new deputy almost asleep in his four-by-four, lulled by the crackling song of the dispatcher, on the bartender, slowly wiping a glass and racking it, one eye checking the game. It shines down on the fox’s red and grey life, as he stills, a shadow beside someone’s gate, listening to winter. Its pale gaze caresses the lovers, curled together under a quilt, dreaming alone, and shines on the scattered ashes of terrible fires, on the owl’s black flight, on the whelks, on the murmuring kelp, on the whale that washed up six weeks ago at the base of the dunes, and it shines on the backhoe that buried her.

Now they to their slogged forthwendings tend, four hunters, guns askew like four unruly hairs, to start the rabbit or pheasant from hiding. But these cocks, wily, lie close and spy from covert or culvert the passing grim party and the rabbit keeps Viet-Cong-like to its digs. Here is no hunting horn and gargle of hounds among horse whinny and hoof stamp and ladies in smart hunting habits, though these four sport red in patterns motley or checkered and in hues fluorescent as road crewmen’s vests. Small wonder the game is not game, so uncouthly strikes the eye this drawling troupe of unshaven hope and choler and color. The roadside sparrows, come to dust, scatter before the headlong hum of him leather-crouched, helmet-missled over the speed-stretched oval wheels of his hundred-mile-per-hour crotch rocket all the way to Lone Tree past the six-foot Iowa corn, surprised cows and hogs and the high horse considering gravely over the fence this black burst of boots and gloves and goggles. So the goggle-eyed frog dives under a scum of ditch-vetched water fern and the blue-backed kestrel stoops from its crystal insulator perch and, gray as a piece of the paving, up springs the four-inch grasshopper splat! like a nicotine bullet in the teeth. Bearded buggy dads on their way to market, fine trotters high-stepping between shafts, broad-brim-hatted, blue-chambray-shirted, with black pants and black suspenders, sons like scrubbed minor replicas, dutiful daughters, eyes downcast among chatter of bonneted grannies and mothers, patriarchal grandfathers observing that rain must come as it always has, God’s will be done, and brief gossip also among the elders of shunning a deacon caught in unnatural circumstances with a pig—the Devil’s own vessel!—and of Sister Sara, who’s soon to require the midwife, as the moon too is full almost.

His hand in hold so trigger-tight its blood believes in ghosts. It clings with finger set on steel and waits inside a dream of ducks. The twilight burns into a rising arc of eastern sky as sun reveals herself too proud and instantly receives full-face a splash of mallard flock. A shotgun blasts the yellow into streaming pinks and gives the creek its new-day taste of echoed blood. Two green head ghosts fly through the pulse of dawn upon a trigger’s touch. The creek empties of sound. In silence human fingers find wet feet of web and carry in each hand a bird whose only cry comes in color.

for Dave Smith Our clothes are still wet from wading The Chickamunga last evening. There is heavy frost. We have Walked on the dead all night. Now in the firelight We are exchanging shells and grapeshot. I can still hear our loud huzzah When late in the day The enemy fell into full retreat Along the pine ridge to the east. . . We chased them until we were weary. Each night this week There’s been something To keep me from sleep. Just an hour ago I saw A dead sharpshooter sitting Against a rock with a scallop Of biscuit still lodged in his mouth. He wore one silk sock. Snedikerhas returned from Chattanooga With five thousand convalescents For the left wing of their musketry. We have roasted a deer With a molasses sauce and pepper. Magrill and zandt have returned From horse hunting with a sack of sugar. By morning we will have buried our dead And fed the prisoners: Joe Cotton Will hang all seven of them in one tree When he sees they’re done Licking their fingers. . . I shot a Rebel yesterday In high water just for cursing me. Just six months ago For that alone it would have meant Three days in stockade. We can see now that cannonading Has set the hillside on fire. The wounded Grays Will be burned Beyond their Christian names. . . Joe Cotton says he’d ask God For rain, but he’s got no tent And river water Has chilled him straight through To the very quick of his being.