1630 Nature poems

She could be any woman at all, caught off-guard on-guard. With her hands stroking or strangling and maybe with her intentions half-interred. But she is as she is. Her gaze is always filing away at its cord. And what she's really after is you to love her. She forgets who she is. She could be so small she almost has no smell. She feels like anyone at all. When you walk up to her, she keeps quite still, but what she answers to is never loud enough to know. Eaten away by outwardness, her eyes are empty. They could be watching you or not. They work indifferently, like lit-up glass and if you ask why she won't speak, why should she? When what she really wants is silence. You know what women are like: Kay, Moira, Sandra. They move through a dark room, peering round under the hoods of their names. Alcestis, Clytemnestra. She could be either of those. She scarcely knows. She goes on thinking something just over your shoulder. This could be the last night before you lose her. But what's the use of saying one thing or another. When what she's really after is you to love her.

My bands of silk and miniver Momently grew heavier; The black gauze was beggarly thin; The ermine muffled mouth and chin; I could not suck the moonlight in. Harlequin in lozenges Of love and hate, I walked in these Striped and ragged rigmaroles; Along the pavement my footsoles Trod warily on living coals. Shouldering the thoughts I loathed, In their corrupt disguises clothed, Morality I could not tear From my ribs, to leave them bare Ivory in silver air. There I walked, and there I raged; The spiritual savage caged Within my skeleton, raged afresh To feel, behind a carnal mesh, The clean bones crying in the flesh.

I find it in a field of feathers, pink-crested, a knuckle of bone picked clean by the wind, a pale mohawk mounted on stone. I bend down. Zeroed out of its head are two sockets, two airy planets full with sun, and taking asylum in one a millipede is coiled, a slick black hypnotist. Polished, it spirals in on itself like one of Saint Hilda’s fossil snakes we studied in the school chapel’s stained glass. As if the eye could dig itself into the earth then extend a curled feeler out, like a fern. I turn the skull round in my palm like a pebble— it will not settle. Otherwise, all is still: the grasses claw in, the world does not tilt. Even the blue stand of scrub grows over; it has nothing on its mind. But the skull will outlast the summer, a thought cut short, and I will pass it every day as I walk and stop just here, where the air hones its teeth on bone, where the mind remembers itself only as a shell, and I will mourn what was once a world: one eye rolled to the daylight moon, the other pressed down into the earth.

1 A pepper of  bees opens the pupils. An ensemble of aromatics Chorus aphrodisia, mariner’s root, bright sky and night star, heavenly rainbow. Amethyst, azure, blue flower-de-luce. Flowering ring. • White archangelic the bee nettle, the dead nettle. A hide of nettle cloth, of finely-nerved sedge. Take heed the edges, the pipes, the passages, the petal corridor, the corolla tube. • A blossom is a throat. Rose oil and hip. A ripped rose is a voice organ, time-cut and curt. Royally red and confidence- keeping, redder than Mars, redder than hot days and parched, Venus on the lips. 2 Muscle rose. Flesh rose. A verge toward red Then rustling redshank rose. Vines ascend the arch of aorta. Mercurial, the climbing nightshade, the bundle-branched bittersweet. • White-spotted hellebore under Jupiter and wind. Oak lungs, jovial lungs. Sea rush blows the lungs with sweet rose, carmine and sanguine, flaming red. Candleberry fires the blood. • Red is antispasmodic, cardiovascular. Great garden patience of Mars. May-blossom, hawthorn. Spring gushes red-veined with sorrel, bloodwort below Jupiter, red dock for longevity. 3 Venus stokes the throatwort. Ringing with wasps The good leaf. The rose noble. L’herbe du siège slackens the isthmus of the fauces. Gash-red and choking rose. • Double tongue. Bay laurel. Daphne of the sun. Yarrow charms wasps, snuffs the inveterate headache. Daphne sings the bees from the ears. • The voice reeds are a Queen Anne’s lace of wasps. Mercury abounds with buzz and wild carrot, jump-starts speech with hoar-strange words, a gargle of hog’s fennel and brimstone wort. 4 Under Leo, composure. Touchwood and rue Herb of grace. Anti-magical. Vinegar of the four thieves. Poison against poison. Rue before regret. Touch wood Ruta sets the garden free. • Lightning sulfur the garden prone to primrose and paroxysm. Pellitory- of-the-wall quells old hacking. An old cough. A new moon courtesy of wild clary. Eyebright. Clear eye (en toute bonne foi). • Sweep away the broom, the burdock, the beastly antipathy between ash tree and adder. Snakeweed. Dragon’s blood. Devil’s bit. Serpent’s tongue. Wickedness (a weak moon) licked & licked & licked. 5 What a commotion! Wild rocket, a racket Flesh and blood of wake robin, cuckoo point, the clear caroling rise & fall. Volatile dog’s mercury. Dog’s-grass. Dog rose. Hot fits and cold metallic blue. The indecisive indigo. • So the garden bellyaches. So what the gripes? Rows rife with tormentil, gallant herb of the sun. Five fingers, flesh and blood. Stamina, life’s long thread, root-red, the unhindered heart. • Leaves respire and rain returns blood-veined and blood dock, blood-colored juices. Red poppy a headache. Heartichoke the downhearted. Loosestrife calms the fugitive scarlet. Sweet slumber. The fleshy rootstock. 6 Enlist imagination under the banner of science. Erasmus Darwin, Flora attired by the elements. his Botanic Muse Sea lavender, sea holly, sundrops. Jacob’s ladder reaching ether. Wind rose. Sun rose. Water grass. • The loves of the plants. (The economy of vegetation.) Root, pith, lobes, plume, calyx, coral, sap. Air distributes the seeds of names. Windflower, digitalis. Tipsy and ethereal. Trade winds, vital light. Seeds within seeds. • Start from the soil, and win their airy way. The fifty-seeded heart’s delight, saturnine and doting wild. Heart’s-ease. Herb constancy. Pensée...    An opening. Call-me-to-you. Kiss-her- in-the-buttery. Meet-me-in-the-entry. 7 The yard wants what the yard wants. Rose Bloom of Ruth. Breath of life. Blush. Charisma. Compassion. Imagination. Ebb Tide and Nostalgia. Ground cover and climbers. Floribunda. Abundance. • A hybrid of bruise and steep, petal and dreg. Lungfuls of lamp flower, rose campion, rose of heaven. The moon shoulders roseroot, rosy-colored stonecrop. The neck laced with French rose, common rose, pomander of roses. • At the center of the garden the heart. Red as any rose. Pulsing balloon vine. Love in a puff. Heartseed, heart-of-the-earth. A continuous flow of red. 8 Nosebleed, staunchweed, sanguinary. List Thousand-leaved root of yellow. Thousand weed with leaves like feathers. Small birds flirt herb-of-Venus’ tree. If my love love me, nosebleed and yarrow. • Feverfew-profuse June and July. Agueweed, sweating-plant, boneset with yellow thrum. Venus yields to water. Boneset breaks the sun. • Past mudwalls and molehills, where the cowslips and the lungs moss, hedge bells, morning glory and the hundred-leaved rose, all the livelong organs rose — a catalogue, a desire, a wish. 9 Chaffweed whups the chin-cough. Life everlasting Venus hiccups dry wind and sandy rows. The garden ruminates cudweed, creeping roots June through September. Pearl-flowered. Eternal flower. • Take flower-gentle. Take knitbone and knitback. Ass ear. Blackwort. Slippery root. Saturn’s orbit comfrey-picked and sea-goat-prickly. Take sea wrack, knobbed wrack, bladderwrack. • Paralysis and palsywort the garden supplants fool’s parsley with imperatives! Forget-me-not. Forget-me-not. Forget-me-not. Mouse-ear to the ground. Borage for courage. Self-heal. All-heal. By crook or by hook-heal. 10 La voilà! Horsetail and paddock-pipes. Viola organista A hurdy-gurdyish drone. Pansy-meek with cattail and fretted tension. (Love-in-idleness.) The over-thinking viola. • Liverwort, liverleaf, liverweed. A low sun and Jupiter presumes three-lobed hepatica. Water hectors wind and wind blows sound into lungwort, bladderwort, kidneywort, the kidney-leaved sower weed, the hartwort. • Dame de coeur. The crowning heart. The garden wants it all: leaf, stem, root, the whole shooting match shoot system, timbre, pitch, fully chromatic rows, heart trefoil and arssmart under sun.

A black cat among roses, Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon, The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still, It is dazed with moonlight, Contented with perfume, Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies. Firefly lights open and vanish High as the tip buds of the golden glow Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet. Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises, Moon-spikes shafting through the snow ball bush. Only the little faces of the ladies’ delight are alert and staring, Only the cat, padding between the roses, Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern As water is broken by the falling of a leaf. Then you come, And you are quiet like the garden, And white like the alyssum flowers, And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies. Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies? They knew my mother, But who belonging to me will they know When I am gone.

Forsythia, scaled and bud-bangled, I pruned to a thatch of leaves for the curb, by the squirrel-gnawed corn, silk strewn, kernels tooth carved and husks shorn over the ground pocked with paw prints. The borers mashed the squash vine, the drought tugged the roots of sage, catmint languished by the sidewalk, tools grew flowers of rust. That winter we left our hope beneath the snow, loved through the last of the onions, watched the late leeks freeze to crystal, bent like sedges, their shadows on the snow. That winter we left our hope beneath the snow.

I You are clear O rose, cut in rock, hard as the descent of hail. I could scrape the colour from the petals like spilt dye from a rock. If I could break you I could break a tree. If I could stir I could break a tree— I could break you. II O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it to tatters. Fruit cannot drop through this thick air— fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes. Cut the heat— plough through it, turning it on either side of your path.

How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, or bays, And their uncessant labours see Crown’d from some single herb or tree, Whose short and narrow verged shade Does prudently their toils upbraid; While all flow’rs and all trees do close To weave the garlands of repose. Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence, thy sister dear! Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men; Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow. Society is all but rude, To this delicious solitude. No white nor red was ever seen So am’rous as this lovely green. Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, Cut in these trees their mistress’ name; Little, alas, they know or heed How far these beauties hers exceed! Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound, No name shall but your own be found. When we have run our passion’s heat, Love hither makes his best retreat. The gods, that mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race: Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that she might laurel grow; And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a nymph, but for a reed. What wond’rous life in this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons as I pass, Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass. Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find, Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. Here at the fountain’s sliding foot, Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root, Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide; There like a bird it sits and sings, Then whets, and combs its silver wings; And, till prepar’d for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light. Such was that happy garden-state, While man there walk’d without a mate; After a place so pure and sweet, What other help could yet be meet! But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share To wander solitary there: Two paradises ’twere in one To live in paradise alone. How well the skillful gard’ner drew Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new, Where from above the milder sun Does through a fragrant zodiac run; And as it works, th’ industrious bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!

1. A crow gliding over a ravine was The sign his eyes were waiting for. They thought they were ready to cross. The tumbleweed listening to a cricket And seeing a line of ants snaking in Was the figure of his younger sister, Huddled by him, asking for a campfire. They made it as far as a roadside store And held their hands over the electric coils. When asked if they were going to buy anything, Their tongues broke off into halves And fell to the floor like Popsicles. 2. My father says I was born to translate What he could only nod to for years. He also says that God made a mistake By blurring out his eyes first because He can hear her asking for a blanket. She saw a church adorned with hipbones, Sun-bleached, and beautiful as curved jewelry. She dreamt of its wide doors, and after dipping Her finger in His palm, she felt His warmth. My father says that cactus needles fly And burn like the memory of lost ones, Then he tells me I was born to study The sand trails and notice when footsteps Drag and turn to knee and handprints. Those are ones I need to follow, he says.

slicing this frozen sky know where they are going— and want to get there. Their call, both strange and familiar, calls to the strange and familiar heart, and the landscape becomes the landscape of being, which becomes the bright silos and snowy fields over which the nuanced and muscular geese are calling—while time and the heart take measure.