1630 Nature poems

We could wipe away a fly, Drink, and order that yellow Thing behind the glass, peach Or sweet bread. Sunlight Is catching on a fork, Toothy wink from a star. The fan is busy, the waiter is busy, And today, in this café Of two dollars and fifty Cents, we’re so important Dogs are shaking our hands. “Welcome, turistas,” they say, Or might say if they could Roll their Rs. Where we sit It’s three o’clock, and Across the room, where Old men are playing dominos It’s maybe later, it’s maybe Peru under their hats. There are toads in this place —sullen guards by the door— And the bartender is just another Uncle fooling with the radio. “A little to the left,” I shout, and he dials left, Then right, until it’s German Polkas, accordions by the sea. The toads move a little. An old man clicks a domino. Omar, my gypsy friend, puts in— “Love is chasing me up my sleeve.” I salute him, he salutes me, And together we’re so drunk We’re making sense. Little By little, with rum the color Of a woman’s arm, we’re seeing things— Of a dancer, no two, Make that three with one chair. And that man—the old one Over there—is so blurry He thinks he’s flying.

A gauze bandage wraps the land and is unwound, stained orange with sulfates. A series of slaps molds a mountain, a fear uncoils itself, testing its long cool limbs. A passing cloud seizes up like a carburetor and falls to earth, lies broken- backed and lidless in the scree. Acetylene torches now snug in their holsters, shop-vacs trundled back behind the dawn. A mist becomes a murmur, becomes a moan deepening the dust- choked fissures in the rock O pity us Ignatz O come to us by moonlight O arch your speckled body over the earth.

Gushing from the mouths of stone men To spread at ease under the sky In granite-lipped basins, Where iris dabble their feet And rustle to a passing wind, The water fills the garden with its rushing, In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns. Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone, Where trickle and plash the fountains, Marble fountains, yellowed with much water. Splashing down moss-tarnished steps It falls, the water; And the air is throbbing with it; With its gurgling and running; With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur. And I wished for night and you. I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool, White and shining in the silver-flecked water. While the moon rode over the garden, High in the arch of night, And the scent of the lilacs was heavy with stillness. Night and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!

in Just- spring          when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman whistles          far          and wee and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful the queer old balloonman whistles far          and             wee and bettyandisbel come dancing from hop-scotch and jump-rope and it's spring and the goat-footed balloonMan          whistles far and wee

Not embittered even while freezing to the ice of their own lakes. The night I was leaving for Madrid into the noisy party a dazzling friend-of-a-friend walked in: I want so much (as a couple of kids on the dance floor want) to slow the tempo, hold there longer, to feel that seedly longing to be pressed into the soil, or that little lift the mothers get when stocking larders, even now, vestige of the primitive urge to be provided for and to provide. I went alone to see that balcony in Verona, after the Roman dramas and luxuries above the Spanish Steps, when an elegant footman brought a pack of Reds on a silver tray and all but smoked them for you; after your towels had warmed in London’s best hotel, whose name I can’t remember and am kind of glad, glad now for the rest of empty August and the convent hostel’s eleven o’clock curfew, glad now when I go to the distinguished dinners that I have stood alone wondering at illuminated books, looking at Woolf’s spectacles under glass or standing under Bourgeois’s giant spider at the Tate—at times the best kept universe was my own, no interceding docents or guided tours, but a riverine serendipitous wandering—waif, naïf. I liked the light enormously so why did I obey the bell that called me in?

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations The house was just twinkling in the moon light, And inside it twinkling with delight, Is my baby bright. Twinkling with delight in the house twinkling with the moonlight, Bless my baby bless my baby bright, Bless my baby twinkling with delight, In the house twinkling in the moon light, Her hubby dear loves to cheer when he thinks and he always thinks when he knows and he always knows that his blessed baby wifey is all here and he is all hers, and sticks to her like burrs burrs In the phrase “sticks to her like burrs,” these are prickly flower heads. One other definition of a burr is a circle of light about the moon or a star. , blessed baby

How quiet is the spruce, the wind twills through the uppermost tier of splayed leaves. Now the song of a bird like the squeaky lock over a canoe's oar, followed by startling chirps, the sky pushing its clouds like sailboats, and I think, what kind of God keeps himself secret so that to find him out we have to seek, as children do for something like the beetle scuttling between grass, hidden in plain sight.

1 Is that an attitude for a flower, to stand like a club at the walk; poor slain boy, is that a way to show gratitude to the gods? White with colored hearts, the tall flowers sway around you, all the other boys, in the cold spring, as the violets open. 2 There were no flowers in antiquity but boys’ bodies, pale, perfectly imagined. So the gods sank to human shape with longing. In the field, in the willow grove, Apollo sent the courtiers away. 3 And from the blood of the wound a flower sprang, lilylike, more brilliant than the purples of Tyre. Then the god wept: his vital grief flooded the earth. 4 Beauty dies: that is the source of creation. Outside the ring of trees the courtiers could hear the dove’s call transmit its uniform, its inborn sorrow— They stood listening, among the rustling willows. Was this the god’s lament? They listened carefully. And for a short time all sound was sad. 5 There is no other immortality: in the cold spring, the purple violets open. And yet, the heart is black, there is its violence frankly exposed. Or is it not the heart at the center but some other word? And now someone is bending over them, meaning to gather them— 6 They could not wait in exile forever. Through the glittering grove the courtiers ran calling the name of their companion over the birds’ noise, over the willows’ aimless sadness. Well into the night they wept, their clear tears altering no earthly color.

You could hike over it, the you without a problem, its mountain viewed from the closet coats are found in, your constant Yes/No a hee-haw, a mule alert that’s pasture-perfect, a coronary at the last corner. Nobody’s framing you for the chintz- covered wall to cover the leak. Besides, you like leaks, you’re inside the view as if hibernating or crazy, you try not to erupt. Hypothesize the rest, the languor and freshet, the crags, the serrated parade. So — heights? What about the hairy stream, the pushed-up bushes saying Pet me? You got a problem with that? Cascade is what you call it a voice off the hanger, the blouse cast in a corner or animate.

The brook is this mix of roar & hiss as if God has managed to scalpel a section of tempest & clothespin it in the woods Over There Always draped in the trees while we eat white summer peaches from celadon bowls while the sun bleaches & blue jay squawks score the maple, oak birch and apple-treed sky with their oblique Scriabin musics. Fifteen years since I have seen a real Fall her deciduous burlesque, her glistering things sifting on the old cider mill. A holy show. I hold a wooden fragrance & a sodden mush of crushed flowing apples in a cache and will never give it up. The cardinal is the best bird because it is a red mark on the blank snow amid the charcoal Twombly of maple, oak birch and apple branches. Pines are green & faraway, don’t figure. My sister in spring is even prettier, her smile the genuine quality of it undiminished in the many months since I have been in Happy Valley. It roars and is constantly in spate because it has its reasons spring being spring plus my visiting.