1630 Nature poems

There were no American lions. No pygmy mammoths left or giant short-faced bears, which towered over ten feet high when rearing up on their haunches. There were no stout- legged llamas, stilt-legged llamas, no single Yukon horse. The last of the teratorns, its wingspan broader than the room in which I’m writing now, had long since landed on a tar pit’s surface and was lost. There might be other things to think of strobing in the fume or sometimes poking through the thick of it like the tiny golden toads once so prevalent in the cloud forests north of Monteverde, only none of them were living anywhere anymore. The last was seen on May 15, 1989, the week Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You” topped Billboard’s Hot 100. Then it dropped to three. A teratorn might have fit in here the long way come to think of it. A study claims it wasn’t climate change that killed the golden toad but a fungal epidemic provoked by cyclical weather patterns. Little things like that had a way of disappearing: thimbles, the Rocky Mountain grasshopper, half the hearing in my patient ear. There were no Eastern elk, no sea mink, and no heath hens, a distinct subspecies of the prairie chicken. Once common to the coastal barrens of New Hampshire down to Virginia, they’re often thought to have been eaten in favor of wild turkey at the inaugural Thanksgiving feast. To work on my character I pretend to be traveling Portsmouth to Arlington in modern garb at first, then backwards into costumes of the past: tee shirt and shorts, gray flannel suit, a cutaway jacket and matching breeches tucked into boots, taupe velvet getup with ruffles and ribbons streaming into Delaware till I’m buckled like a Puritan, musket in hand, not half-famished, and there’s plenty of heath hens everywhere I look. But there were still no Carolina parakeets and no Smith Island cottontails, a long contested subspecies of the Eastern cottontail. These lost rabbits, somewhat shaggier than their mainland cousins, were named for the barrier island off the tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where Thomas Dale, deputy governor of the Virginia Colony, set up a salt works back in 1614, and not for the Chesapeake’s other Smith Island up in Maryland, birthplace of the Smith Island cake, that state’s only official dessert — a venerable confection whose pencil- thin layers, numbering eight to twelve on average, lie divided by a fudge-like frosting cooked for greater lastingness, making it suitable for local oystermen to take with them on the long autumn harvest. Smith Island in Washington offers nesting sites for tufted puffins on its rocky cliff faces as well as rest stations for migrant sea lions. Situated in Long Island Sound, Connecticut’s Smith Island is among that state’s famed Thimble Islands, a cluster of landmasses named for the thimbleberry, cousin to the black raspberry. During the Revolutionary War, the Thimbles were deforested to rid the sound of hiding places for British ships. Alabama boasts no fewer than three Smith Islands. Little can be said about the one in Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park. Its neighboring islands include Rabbit, Snake, Wolf, Wigwam, Sweetnose, and Twin Alligator down here on the American side, and Little Dry, Big, and Big Dry up on the Canadian. Tomorrow should be 82° and sunny but it won’t be. The blue pike cavorted through the waters of the Great Lakes no longer. Ditto the somber blackfin cisco. Overfishing, pollution, and the introduction of nonnative species did both fish in as early as 1960 and ’70, respectively. There were no spectacled cormorants, no Goff’s pocket gophers, and no Ainsworth’s salamanders, a species known to us only through two specimens found on Ainsworth family property in Mississippi on June 12, 1964. That same day Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison. I remember the feeling of another kind, the way they alternately lay limp in my hands then pleaded to be free. They took naps in the dampness of softened logs. There’s a fine dirt, a dust I guess, that collects under the rug I’m sitting on. I think the rough weave of it acts as rasp to our foot-bottoms then sieve to what it loosens. There were no Caribbean monk seals, eight of which no less than Christopher Columbus killed for food in 1494, and therefore no Caribbean monk seal nasal mites, an objectively hideous arachnoid parasite that resided nowhere but in the respiratory passages of the Monachus tropicalis. When it occurs to me I sweep it up. Back in the day they used to darken our skies in flocks a mile wide and 300 miles in length, enough to feather the air from Fall River down to Philadelphia, their peak population hovering above five billion, or 40% of the total roll of  birds in North America, but there were no remaining passenger pigeons, the last of their red eyes having shut in Cincinnati on September 1, 1914. Her name was Martha. Martha Washington went by Patsy as a child. Her pet raccoon was Nosey. Cozumel Island’s pygmy raccoon is actually a distinct species and not, like the Barbados raccoon, a subspecies of the common. There might be as few as 250 of the former hidden in the mangroves or prowling the wetlands for ghost crabs and lizards, whereas the latter was last seen in ’64 when one was struck dead by a car in Bathsheba, a fishing village built on Barbados’s eastern shore, magnet for hurricanes and pro surfers, its foamy white waters calling to mind the milk baths rumored to have kept Solomon’s mother so perilously beautiful. First the milk’s lactic acid would have acted as an exfoliant, gently removing layers of the dead, dry skin to uncover younger, fresher skin waiting like artwork in Dunkirk underneath, then the milk’s natural fat content would restore moisture lost to the exacting atmosphere of biblical Jerusalem, whose name in Hebrew,yireh shalem, means “will see peace.” Most versions of the story make her into an exhibitionist but the Midrash says Bathsheba, modest, was washing behind a wicker screen when Satan, seizing opportunity, appeared as a red bird to David who, cocksure with projectiles now, aimed the stone in his hands at the bird but hit the screen instead, splitting it in half and thereby revealing our bather, the wife of Uriah the Hittite at the time but not for much longer. All these gains and losses, so mysterious from a distance, held together it has felt by nothing stronger than momentum, like a series of bicycle accidents or a pattern in the pomegranate, come to hint at a logic in time, but whether it’s more fitting to say that they promise to reveal it or else threaten to is debatable. Attempts to stem the vast mosquito population in salt marshes abutting Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s Merritt Island, technically a peninsula but more like a question mark of land flopped into the Atlantic, devastated the dusky seaside sparrow. Its last known specimen died on June 17, 1987, when the ballad “Always” by Atlantic Starr dominated radio. Mosquitoes would have taken to the nasty Olduvai water hole around which two clans of hominids battle at the start of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is after the first monolith shows up. The film’s monoliths are artifacts of alien origin, identical in ratio but varying in size, designed to provoke large-scale changes in human life. As when it dawns on the wiry leader of the clan the first monolith appears to to bludgeon the other to death with a leg bone. Later on he hurls it into the air to celebrate his power, the image of its tumbling weaponhood at half-speed match-cutting to that of a long white nuclear satellite angled in orbit against the scintillant anthracite of space. Pan right to the Earth, a quarter of it silvery blue in the corner, aloofly beautiful for sure but only a pale idea of a planet when set beside photographs taken years later by the crew of Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972,annus finalis for the Lake Pedder earthworm, bush wren, and possibly the Toolache wallaby as well, long considered among kangaroos to have been the most elegant. The sapphire blue, the ochre of Africa, the chalk-white spirals convolving as if an ice cap’s wispy tentacles. They were killed for fur, sport, and frequently with the aid of greyhounds, who hunt mostly by way of sight as opposed to scent. Then the Earth is at the left as the satellite approaches it almost dozily to the opening bars of Strauss’s Blue Danube, first performed on February 15, 1867, in the now defunct Diana Ballroom. In my own Diana Ballroom, named not for the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon, and chastity directly, but by way of the two-kilometer lunar crater christened in her honor in 1979, declivity in whose embrace my ballroom trembles comfortably, I boost my chi by remembering to breathe deep, to eat oatmeal, ginger, and figs, and to commit myself to a custody of wildflowers, up to and including the maroon perfume of the chocolate cosmos, a non-self-pollinating species whose every plant now in bloom is a clone of the selfsame specimen uprooted from a cubic foot of Mexico back in 1902. Likewise the last known Rocky Mountain locust ever to appear appeared alone that year on a prairie up in Canada, whereas decades before a glistering storm of them blanketed an area vast as California, matter-of-factly devouring buckwheat, barley, strawberries, apple trees, fence posts, and even the laundry wildly flapping away on the line, the sound of “millions of jaws biting and chewing” setting a nation’s nerves on edge, or at least Laura Ingalls Wilder’s, if we’re to believe her On the Banks of Plum Creek

Aspasie, trillistos. I heard the trailing garments of the Night Sweep through her marble halls! I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light From the celestial walls! I felt her presence, by its spell of might, Stoop o'er me from above; The calm, majestic presence of the Night, As of the one I love. I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight, The manifold, soft chimes, That fill the haunted chambers of the Night, Like some old poet's rhymes. From the cool cisterns of the midnight air My spirit drank repose; The fountain of perpetual peace flows there, — From those deep cisterns flows. O holy Night! from thee I learn to bear What man has borne before! Thou layest thy finger on the lips of Care, And they complain no more. Peace! Peace! Orestes-like I breathe this prayer! Descend with broad-winged flight, The welcome, the thrice-prayed for, the most fair, The best-beloved Night!

my pastoral  : four panels of perpetual man and dog concealed within march grass wild acre of strong necks over there   evening’s plate of dark meat synchronized release of feet let me also replicate the spring-loaded as my toilette used against me was pin weaponry there is an exercise I know by heart (the brain) clench the antlers of a stag move some air through my vein

I came upon the gnawed torso of a seal, silver fur agleam against the sand like a coin thrown down in a losing bet. What left this bounty of meat on the beach to rot? I watched the neighbor’s small boys skirt the dead seal the way sandpipers tease themselves in the surf, dodging up and back along the body’s shore. “It’s dead,” I told their father as he ambled behind them up the beach. He called to the little boys, his voice borne toward them on the mild breeze. “Boys, come back,” he said, and they did not.

I hear a river thro’ the valley wander Whose water runs, the song alone remaining. A rainbow stands and summer passes under.

The northern lights.         I wouldn’t have noticed them if the deer hadn’t told me a doe         her coat of pearls         her glowing hoofs proud and inquisitive eager for my appraisal and I went out into the night with electrical steps but with my head held also proud to share the animal’s fear and see what I had seen before a sky flaring and spectral greenish waves and ribbons and the snow         under strange light         tossing in the pasture like a storming ocean caught by a flaring beacon. The deer stands away from me         not far there among bare black apple trees a presence I no longer see. We are proud to be afraid proud to share the silent magnetic storm that destroys the stars and flickers around our heads like the saints’ cold spiritual agonies of old. I remember         but without the sense         other light-storms cold memories discursive and philosophical in my mind’s burden and the deer remembers nothing. We move our feet         crunching bitter snow         while the storm crashes like god-wars down the east we shake the sparks from our eyes we quiver inside our shocked fur we search for each other in the apple thicket— a glimpse, an acknowledgment it is enough and never enough— we toss our heads         and say good night moving away on bitter bitter snow.

I like to see it lap the Miles - And lick the Valleys up - And stop to feed itself at Tanks - And then - prodigious step Around a Pile of Mountains - And supercilious peer In Shanties - by the sides of Roads - And then a Quarry pare To fit its sides And crawl between Complaining all the while In horrid - hooting stanza - Then chase itself down Hill - And neigh like Boanerges - Then - prompter than a Star Stop - docile and omnipotent At it's own stable door -

I looked up from my writing, And gave a start to see, As if rapt in my inditing, The moon's full gaze on me. Her meditative misty head Was spectral in its air, And I involuntarily said, 'What are you doing there?' 'Oh, I've been scanning pond and hole And waterway hereabout For the body of one with a sunken soul Who has put his life-light out. 'Did you hear his frenzied tattle? It was sorrow for his son Who is slain in brutish battle, Though he has injured none. 'And now I am curious to look Into the blinkered mind Of one who wants to write a book In a world of such a kind.' Her temper overwrought me, And I edged to shun her view, For I felt assured she thought me One who should drown him too.

I love all beauteous things, I seek and adore them; God hath no better praise, And man in his hasty days Is honoured for them. I too will something make And joy in the making; Altho’ to-morrow it seem Like the empty words of a dream Remembered on waking.

I passed three girls killing a goat, shotgun leaned up against a tree and the entrails spilling into a coil on the ground. It was hooked between the tendons of its back legs to a high branch that gently creaked like a dry hinge busybody aunties wouldn’t oil. Blood drained into a pail, you could smell it shifting with the air, and black flies landed in the shadows of things where the wind didn’t touch. I dreamed I was carrying a sack filled with animals, and it dragged blood in the gravel and stained my skirt hem, you could follow my trail to the county line where old men sat on the liquor store porch. One crooked his half-arm for the bottle where the auger had caught his hand. I dreamed I was in a new country rinsing livers under a spigot, and the men cracking black walnuts on a stone named my limbs like the weather, like none of us knew the same words. By the tree the girls and the goat were faltering, one squatted to sharpen her blackened blade on a strop, and the men on the county line leaned back on the heels of their chairs talking about anything, each other, spring weather, the long-haired boy scalped by a combine, and one of them swore you only plant beans with the moon in Capricorn otherwise the fields choke up with scrub juniper. One looked intently at his left palm; his right wrist uselessly brushed the woven seat of his chair. When a wind came, the screen door leapt up on its leather hinges which never creaked and slammed shut. Mud daubers in the muck by the spigot blew sideways around my ankles and up under my skirt, and inside I could hear the woman who lived with the liquor store proprietor cursing as she locked up the vanilla like she knew how to break the back of a ghost.