1630 Nature poems

With the body of a morbid hanging doll my aura burns by shifts by ambles by mirages by the sun in its primordial morass summoned from a spectral locust feast through electric bartering grammes living as if a spectrum had been transmogrified across the sum of exploded solar windows amidst motions of viral infamy of sudden discharge pontoons of magical lyncean sails above ships of pure vitrescence enthralled by empty Minoan game dogs debating oxygen as form debating menace as ideal as one listens to fire in dense eruptional gullet in hanging hydrogen mirrors so that each image is shifted back & forth between gales & the apparition of gales so that unicorns from Çatal Hüyük cease to condense as forms of the earth but take on the body of enigma as transparence as blackened meteor in abstraction the sun no longer quantified by strange calendrical posses but becomes balletic differential which ceases to quarrel with the magic of fragment as schism as mist as a power cast before oasis because the game dogs the unicorn mirrors spun as a wakeless ocular thirst as a conjured distance evolved from the force of a clarified activity like darkened water as shock as scale which looms as humidity then the eyes always focused as pleas for hushed exhibits

These are the streets where we walked with war and childhood Like our two shadows behind us, or Before us like one shadow. River walks Threaded by park rats, flanked by battleships, Flickering of a grey tail on the bank, Motionless hulls Enormous under a dead grey sky. Farther, the harbor and the miscolored waters Rocking their flotsam under the blank round eye At the masthead staring down the rats to come, Beyond the fisher gulls. And the windows full of ropes and hardware, Doorways, barreled, yawning on the dark, Wall-eyed alleys, coils of husky smells, The breath of journeys strong there. Streets whose sordid beauty joked readily with hope. The taller avenues, And walls that smiled like unpurchased horizons, Swung intimate views out of a foreign room, Hung a gate upon a garden's fable, Walls that frowned With aged remorseless eyes Or the gloom of thunderlit landscapes, opening A door into that placeless country Where the sad animal is blithe, free and at home. Too, those halls Where we stepped lightly among the creatures Whom death had tamed, who yet crouched, sprang, or flew, Fierce as hunger, graceful as joy, Until we knew, as in a half silvered mirror, the half Captive image of immortality. These are the old places, and walking there As then with war and childhood, I look into the shadows' faces. They appal. Yet often I will see (The marvels floating alive upon that stream, The breathing of delight like purest air) Another place: that you contrived Between midnight and morning In your dream, and in the morning Took me there. We greeted it, who could not stay. But it is there, Surviving disbelief, surviving even what the malign years prepare.

some say I'm now almost extinct in this park but the people who say this don't know that by smelling the orchids in the trees they're sensing the fragrance of my chops that by hearing the rumbling of the waterfalls they're listening to my ancestors' great roar that by observing the constellations of the night sky they're gazing at the star spots on my fur that I am and always will be the wild untamed living spirit of this jungle

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.