1630 Nature poems

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.

The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away The sand. The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.” The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made: There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be Never again the same. “Why, this is hell.” Out of the death breeding Soil, here, rise emblems of innocence, snowdrops that struggle Easily into life and hang their white enamel heads toward the dirt And in the yellow grass are small wild crocuses from hills goats Have cropped to barrenness. The corms come by mail, are planted. Then do their thing: to live! To live! So natural and so hard Hard as it seems it must be for green spears to pierce the all but Frozen mold and insist that they too, like mouse-eared chickweed, Will live. The spears lengthen, the bud appears and spreads, its Seed capsule fattens and falls, the green turns yellowish and withers Stretched upon the ground. In Washington, magnolias were in bud. In Charlottesville early bulbs were up, brightening the muck. Tomorrow Will begin another spring. No one gets many, one at a time, like a long Awaited letter that one day comes. But it may not say what you hoped Or distraction robs it of what it once would have meant. Spring comes And the winter weather, here, may hold. It is arbitrary, like the plan Of Washington, D.C. Avenues and circles in asphalt web and no One gets younger: which is not, for the young, true, discovering new Freedoms at twenty, a relief not to be a teen-ager anymore. One of us Had piles, another water on the knee, a third a hernia—a strangulated Hernia is one of life’s less pleasant bits of news—and only One, at twenty, moved easily through all the galleries to pill Free sleep. Oh, it’s not all that bad. The sun shines on my hand And the myriad lines that criss-cross tell the story of nearly fifty Years. Sorry, it’s too long to relate. Once, when I was young, I Awoke at first light and sitting in a rocking chair watched the sun Come up beyond the houses across the street. Another time I stood At the cables of a liner and watched the wake turning and Turning upon itself. Another time I woke up and in a bottle On a chest of drawers the thoughtful doctor had left my tonsils. I Didn’t keep them. The turning of the globe is not so real to us As the seasons turning and the days that rise out of early gray —The world is all cut-outs then—and slip or step steadily down The slopes of our lives where the emotions and needs sprout. “I Need you,” tree, that dominates this yard, thick-waisted, tall And crook branched. Its bark scales off like that which we forget: Pain, an introduction at a party, what precisely happened umpteen Years or days or hours ago. And that same blue jay returns, or perhaps It is another. All jays are one to me. But not the sun which seems at Each rising new, as though in the night it enacted death and rebirth, As flowers seem to. The roses this June will be different roses Even though you cut an armful and come in saying, “Here are the roses,” As though the same blooms had come back, white freaked with red And heavily scented. Or a cut branch of pear blooms before its time, “Forced.” Time brings us into bloom and we wait, busy, but wait For the unforced flow of words and intercourse and sleep and dreams In which the past seems to portend a future which is just more Daily life. The cat has a ripped ear. He fights, he fights all The tom cats all the time. There are blood gouts on a velvet seat. Easily sponged off: but these red drops on a book of Stifter’s, will I remember and say at some future time, “Oh, yes, that was the day Hodge had a torn ear and bled on the card table?” Poor Hodge, battered like an old car. Silence flows into my mind. It Is spring. It is also still really winter. Not a day when you say, “What a beautiful spring day.” A day like twilight or evening when You think, “I meant to watch the sun set.” And then comes on To rain. “You’ve got to take,” says the man at the store, “the rough With the smooth.” A window to the south is rough with raindrops That, caught in the screen, spell out untranslatable glyphs. A story Not told: so much not understood, a sight, an insight, and you pass on, Another day for each day is subjective and there is a totality of days As there are as many to live it. The day lives us and in exchange We it: after snowball time, a month, March, of fits and starts, winds, Rain, spring hints and wintry arrears. The weather pays its check, Like quarreling in a D.C. hotel, “I won’t quarrel about it, but I made No local calls.” Strange city, broad and desolating, monuments Rearing up and offices like monuments and crowds lined up to see The White House inside. “We went to see the White House.   It was lovely.” Not so strange though as the cemetery with guttering flame and Admirals and generals with bigger gravestones than the lesser fry Below Lee’s house, false marble pillars and inside all so Everyday, in every room a shawl tossed untidily upon a chair or bed Created no illusion of lived-in-ness. But the periwinkles do, in beds That flatten and are starred blue-violet, a retiring flower loved, It would seem, of the dead, so often found where they congregate. A Quote from Aeschylus: I forget. All, all is forgotten gradually and One wonders if these ideas that seem handed down are truly what they were? An idea may mutate like a plant, and what was once held basic truth Become an idle thought. like, “Shall we plant some periwinkles there By that bush? They’re so to be depended on.” The wind shakes the screen And all the raindrops on it streak and run in stems. It’s colder. The crocuses close up. The snowdrops are brushed with mud. The sky Colors itself rosily behind gray-black and the rain falls through The basketball hoop on a garage, streaking its backboard with further Trails of rust, a lovely color to set with periwinkle violet-blue. And the trees shiver and shudder in the light rain blasts from off The ocean. The street wet reflects the breakup of the clouds On its face, driving over sky with a hissing sound. The car Slides slightly and in the west appear streaks of different green: A lid lifted briefly on the spring. Then the moon burns through Racing clouds, its aureole that of rings of oil on water in a harbor Bubbling up from an exhaust. Clear the sky. Beside a rim of moon. Three stars and only three and one planet. So under lilacs unleaved Lie a clump of snowdrops and one purple crocus. Purple. A polka-dotted Color little girls are fond of: “See my new dess!” and she twirls On one foot. Then, crossed, bursts into tears. Smiles and rain, like These passing days in which buds swell, unseen as yet, waiting For the elms to color their further out most twigs, only the willow Gleams yellow. Life is hard. Some are strong, some weak, most Untested. These useless truths blow about the yard the day after Rain the soft sunlight making softer shadows on the faded lawn. The world looks so old in the spring, laid out under the sky. One Gull coasts by, unexpected as a kiss on the nape of the neck. These Days need birds and so they come, a flock of ducks, and a bunch of Small fluffy unnamed balls that hide in hedges and make a racket. “The gift of life,” as though, existing in expectancy and then Someone came up and said, “Here,” or, “Happy Birthday.” It is more Mysterious than that, pierced by blue or running in the rain Or simply lying down to read. Writing a postponed letter which may Bring no pleasure: arduous truths to tell. And if you thought March was bad Consider April, early April, wet snow falling into blue squills That underneath a beech make an illusory lake, a haze of blue With depth to it. That is like pain, ordinary household pain, Like piles, or bumping against a hernia. All the signs are set for A OK A day to visit the National Gallery—Velázquez, Degas—but, and What a but, with water on the knee “You’ll need a wheelchair, Mummy.” Coasting among the masterpieces, of what use are they?Angel with a Hurdy-Gurdy