1630 Nature poems

1 My soul radially whorls out to the edges of my body, according to the same laws by which stars shine, communicating with my body by emanation. When you see her, you feel the impact of what visual can mean. Invisibility comes through of deep pink or a color I see clairvoyantly. This felt sense at seeing the rose extends, because light in the DNA of my cells receives light frequencies of the flower as a hologram. The entire rose, petals in moving air, emotion of perfume records as a sphere, so when I recall the emotion, I touch dimensionality. From a small bud emerges a tight wound bundle of babyskin coral petals, held in a half globe, as if by cupped hands. Then petals are innumerable, loose, double, sumptuous, unified. I look through parted fingers to soften my gaze, so slow light shining off the object is filtered; then with feeling I look at swift color there. It's swiftness that seems still as noon light, because my seeing travels at the same speed. I make a reciprocal balance between light falling on the back of my eye to optic nerve to pineal gland, radiance stepping down to matter, and my future self opening out from this sight. A moment extends to time passing as sense impression of a rose, including new joys where imagined roses, roses I haven't yet seen or seen in books record as my experience. Then experience is revelation, because plants and people have in their cells particles of light that can become coherent, that radiate out physically and also with the creativity of metaphor, as in a beam of light holographically, i.e., by intuition, in which I inhale the perfume of the Bourbon rose, then try to separate what is scent, sense, and what you call memory, what is emotion, where in a dialogue like touching is it so vibratory and so absorbent of my attention and longing, with impressions like fingerprints all over. I'm saying physical perception is the data of my embodiment, whereas for the rose, scarlet itself is matter. 2 The rose communicates instantly with the woman by sight, collapsing its boundaries, and the woman widens her boundaries. Her "rate of perception" slows down, because of its complexity. There's a feeling of touching and being touched, the shadings of color she can sense from touch. There's an affinity between awareness and blossom. The rose symbolizes the light of this self-affinity. I come to visit drooping white cabbage roses at dusk. That corner of the garden glows with a quality of light I might see when light shines through mist or in early morning reflects off water. I stand quietly and allow this quality to permeate air around me. Here, with a white rose, color is clairsentient, this color in the process of being expressed, like seeing Venus in the day. Walking, I move in and out of negative space around which each rose is engaged and become uncertain of my physical extent as an object. Look at the energy between people and plants; your heart moves into depth perception; for depth, read speed of light. I set my intention through this sense of moving into coherence with the bio-photons of a plant and generate feeling in response. A space opens and awareness gathers it in, as at night my dream is colorless and weaves into the nuance. I can intentionally engage with the coherence of light beams, instant as though lightless, or the colored light of a dimension not yet arrived, as our hearts are not outside affinity with respect to wavelength, shaping meaning, using the capacity for feeling to sense its potency in a rose and to cultivate inter-being with summer perfume.

We scratch at the backyard together through leaf mould, worm casings she kicks off in a fan behind her. I use a stick to dig, to find for her what she’s shown me near the roots, at the edge of a step—sticky slug on the underside of a hosta’s leaf. How complicated she is and how resigned. Between her beak and my outstretched hand, the worm’s writhing. Then the long slick going down. It fills the throat, like all that’s swallowed. Her head chucks it back, for the worm again dark. The hen’s pupil dilates. She wends and follows. Her queries, sighs, low gurgles, the hastening click of her nails on pavement then hungry again into the grass. Grubs are larger than pale yellow larvae I prize from inside chestnuts. These mucousy blind wanderers she eats right from my palm. Nevertheless I am repulsed by my husband’s embrace. I turn now from his thick belly, breasts, his interests. A body I had clambered over, loved. I scrabble, struggle. I cover myself. Another sticky truth dug up that I must re-bury— sorry on hands and knees, hungry and wary.

The day comes in strips of yellow glass over trees. When I tell you the day is a poem I’m only talking to you and only the sky is listening. The sky is listening; the sky is as hopeful as I am walking into the pomegranate seeds of the wind that whips up the seawall. If you want the poem to take on everything, walk into a hackberry tree, then walk out beyond the seawall. I’m not far from a room where Van Gogh was a patient—his head on a pillow hearing the mistral careen off the seawall, hearing the fauvist leaves pelt the sarcophagi. Here and now the air of the tepidarium kissed my jaw and pigeons ghosting in the blue loved me for a second, before the wind broke branches and guttered into the river. What questions can I ask you? How will the sky answer the wind? The dawn isn’t heartbreaking. The world isn’t full of love.

Is the ocean really inside seashells or is it all in your mind? — PICHON DE LA ONCE Behold and soak like a sponge. I have discovered that the island of Puerto Rico is the ears of Saru-Saru, a poet reputed to have lived in Atlantis. On the day that the water kissed and embraced and filled all the holes of that giant missing link, this bard’s curiosity was the greatest for he kept swimming and listening for causes. He picked up rocks before they sank and blew wind viciously into them. Finally he blew so hard into a rock that he busted his ear drums; angry, he recited poems as he tried turning into a bird to fly to green Brazil. His left ear opened up like a canal and a rock lodged in it. Rock attracts rock and many rocks attached to this rock. It got like a rocket. His ear stayed with it in a horizontal position. Finally after so many generations he got to hear what he most wanted: the sounds made by flowers as they stretched into the light. Behold, I have discovered that the island of Puerto Rico is the ears of Saru-Saru.

Here is the Beehive But where are all the bees? Hiding away where nobody sees. Here they come creeping Out of their hive, One and two and three, four, five.

Warmth activates the sugars, and sugars rally in the gorse, in the flowers it sees with, the scent that is its voice, the nontoxic fragrant wood good for cutlery, and for burning, though it flares out quickly, unlike smoldering peat. Are they converting sugars of their loneliness to conviction? Burning their sugars on the wicks of their frailty, one can nearly read by them, as Fillan in his own cave read by the light of  his broken arm, one of the horrible miracles of the times — St. Fillan, the Human Flashlight, patron of the mentally ill — an unenviable between-worlds position. Whereas marsh orchids, fully in this one, change their clothes out in the open, hard candy in their mouths, the sugars plump, round, smooth, unlike seawater’s jagged molecules, which when drunk like anger will tear through you. Like bitterness, desiccate you. To survive, suffering burns the strength of the afflicted. If, left in Fillan’s cave, bonds of the stricken were loosened by morning, his spirit had intervened to convert the molecules of their madness, and still later did smugglers stash there some of those little things that make life worth living. The highly edible sweet gorse flowers produce a coconut-flavored wine if one enjoys the luxury of time, and a tea prescribed in cases of uncertainty, for those who appear to have lost all hope.

There are diagrams on stilts all wired together Over the hill and the wind and out of sight. There is a scar in the trees where they walk away Beyond me. There are signs of something Nearly God (or at least most curious) About them. I think those diagrams are not At rest. I think they are a way of ciphering God: He is the hugest socket and all his miracles Are wired behind him scarring the hill and the wind As the waterfall flies roaring to his city On the open palms of the diagram. There is Shining, I suppose, in that city at night And measure for miracles, and wheels whirling So quick-silver they seem to be going backwards. And there’s a miracle already. But I Went naked through his wood of diagrams On a day of the rain beside me to his city. When I kissed that socket with my wet lip My teeth fell out, my fingers sprouted chives, And what a bald head chewed on my sick heart!

On the crowded hill bordering the mill, across the shallow stream, nearer than they seem, they wait and will be waiting. Rain. The small smilax is the same to the fly as the big bush of lilacs exploding nearby. The rain may be abating. On the quiet hill beside the droning mill, across the dirty stream, nearer than they seem, they wait and will be waiting. The glass-eyed cicada drones in the linden draped like a tent above three polished stones. Aphids swarm at the scent of the yellow petals. A bird comes to prod a clump of wet fur. The ferns idiotically nod when she takes it away with her. Something somewhere settles. On the crowded hill bordering the mill is our best cemetery, pretty, but not very. All are welcome here. Sun finds a bare teak box on the tidy green plot. It finds lichen-crusted blocks fringed with forget-me-not. Angels preen everywhere. On the crowded hill bordering the mill is our best cemetery, pretty, but not very. All are welcome here.

The Ozarks are where defeated assassins, the unholy, and monsters come to retire. The proper soil and crooked moonlight grow back the disemboweled, the decapitated, while we collect arrears in child support for our demi-god children. The procession of taillights lined deep down the logging trails. Along the way, there was a gentleman arguing with his soul over his suicide. I, tongue of snakes. Cut up, dipped in powdered sugar, scattered to the ants in the deepest corner of Mt. Nebo as an insult, bind my ghost to the mountain. Typhoon collected the few precious scales left of me from the undertow. My southern accent-muscle burned up from haunting your life/house. Now, let daybreak be my head and the year, my whole body. An online southern Christian university ordained my smoker’s cough to be a dove. My favorite exorcism: The demon, steeped in corn bread philosophy, does not have enough ass to carry off the jeans he advertises as he kneels down to the priest and holy water. Years ago, as a child, I climbed the levee and made a hole in the air. That’s where I will rest, but the gate is not wide enough. Like my burial site, I am party-size.

—Norton Island, Maine For ten days now, two luna moths remain silk-winged and lavish as a double broach pinned beneath the porch light of my cabin. Two of them, patinaed that sea-glass green of copper weather vanes nosing the wind, the sun-lit green of rockweed, the lichen’s green scabbing-over of the bouldered shore, the plush green peat that carpets the island, that hushes, sinks then holds a boot print for days, and the sapling-green of new pines sprouting through it. The miraculous green origami of their wings—false eyed, doomed and sensual as the mermaid’s long green fins: a green siren calling from the moonlight. A green siren calling from the moonlight, from the sweet gum leaves and paper birches that shed, like tiny white decrees, scrolled bark. They emerge from cocoons like greased hinges, all pheromone and wing, instinct and flutter. They rise, hardwired, driven, through the creaking pine branches tufted with beard moss and fog. Two luna moths flitting like exotic birds towards only each other and light, in these their final few days, they mate, then starving they wait, inches apart, on my cabin wall to die, to share fully each pure and burning moment. They are, like desire itself, born without mouths. What, if not this, is love?