1630 Nature poems

came in an envelope with no return address; she was small, wore wrinkled dress of figured cotton, full from neck to ankles, with a button of bone at the throat, a collar of torn lace. She was standing before a monumental house— on the scale you see in certain English films: urns, curved drives, stone lions, and an entrance far too vast for any home. She was not of that place, for she had a foreign look, and tangled black hair, and an ikon, heavy and strange, dangling from an oversize chain around her neck, that looked as if some tall adult had taken it from his, and hung it there as a charm to keep her safe from a world of infinite harm that soon would take him far from her, and leave her standing, as she stood now—barefoot, gazing without expression into distance, away from the grandeur of that house, its gravel walks and sculpted gardens. She carried a basket full of flames, but whether fire or flowers with crimson petals shading toward a central gold, was hard to say—though certainly, it burned, and the light within it had nowhere else to go, and so fed on itself, intensified its red and burning glow, the only color in the scene. The rest was done in grays, light and shadow as they played along her dress, across her face, and through her midnight hair, lively with bees. At first they seemed just errant bits of shade, until the humming grew too loud to be denied as the bees flew in and out, as if choreographed in a country dance between the fields of sun and the black tangle of her hair. Without warning a window on one of the upper floors flew open— wind had caught the casement, a silken length of curtain filled like a billowing sail—the bees began to stream out from her hair, straight to the single opening in the high facade. Inside, a moment later—the sound of screams. The girl—who had through all of this seemed unconcerned and blank—all at once looked up. She shook her head, her mane of hair freed of its burden of bees, and walked away, out of the picture frame, far beyond the confines of the envelope that brought her image here—here, where the days grow longer now, the air begins to warm, dread grows to fear among us, and the bees swarm.

The last ice age had been caused by a wobble. After it passed they made houses from stars; Visitors would peer in And see the tongs not slipping, Roomsized pebbles having been moved far. It’s like this more When we speak than when we write; Loving thus we have been Loved by ground, The word being A box with four of its corners hidden; Everything else is round.

A bunch of glads, certainly highly emblematic of creation, remote from frills of working blossom with hope of fruit: slow, durable, placid, generous, sure of kingly dreams. All else is natural world and intellect! Over there the mutton herds: strenuous ends of clover and daggy sheep— here friendly talents, pushing Anna to the center of attention, explaining her, finding a solution! The glads offer no solution: being—falling— you mustn’t count the days— fulfillment livid, tattered, or beautiful.

The song sparrow puts all his saying into one repeated song: what variations, subtleties he manages, to encompass denser meanings, I’m too coarse to catch: it’s one song, an over-reach from which all possibilities, like filaments, depend: killing, nesting, dying, sun or cloud, figure up and become song—simple, hard: removed.

The motion of gathering loops of water Must either burst or remain in a moment. The violet colors through the glass Throw up little swellings that appear And spatter as soon as another strikes And is born; so pure are they of colored Hues, that we feel the absent strength Of its power. When they begin they gather Like sand on the beach: each bubble Contains a complete eye of water.

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat Cry “We are ripe, reap us!” —Ted Hughes I begin to think Actaeon never changed. The words that followed him, the poems That leapt upon him and left him for dead Were difficult exactly to the extent They were rational. It makes perfect sense For nakedness to give way to frenzy. And the poems, let’s be clear, were naked. Time was, questions were put, clear as water. The Goddess bathed, and time was the soft smile Of water catching the sunlight on her. And the sunlight, let’s be clear, was sheer murder. Into the same creature, no human word Leaps twice. Given to frenzy, nakedness Smiles upon the breaking of men and dogs. How easy to lose all patience with chaste things! Christ, I am hoping to hear from you Before the hunters and suicides make off with me. Christ, I am hoping to take your weapons To a tarn freezing in the death of me. I shall harry the moon there. I shall halloo. Bayed in the cross-tree is a lion too. In 1969 a red stag made A cobweb of moonlight in his antlers. For once in your life, pray without ceasing, Pray the stag safely by the lion’s tree. Actaeon never changed. Predator Is simply prey to nakedness and reason. The poems have been out hunting all the time. Then it is Friday. Frisk. You might as well. Seeing as the rapeweed, you might as well. The lion is no stranger. The belling Stag is as familiar as the moon, but a strange Suicide. Taken by legs, taken By sinews, kissing the cobwebs of moonlight, He prays the prayer I was not quick to say. Berries and hoardings, ermine horseplay short Of the new, short of poems no longer old As I knew them, leaving the small schools For the main campus rapeweed climbing, pale. It is Friday. Stars won’t cross. Actaeon Never imagined the frail, sheer speed Of meat. Christ, eat me. Nothing else makes sense. On the far Safe side of becoming, Metaphor Is all love, The pure being of each Nude above Perfect sense. I begin to hunt words. The tension The soft smile Of the Goddess eases A short while Reappears In a red stag’s terror. Metaphor Leaps and eats. It is not difficult. Love is meat. The dogs leap on Actaeon. He is human. I begin to think of Time as anything In the gift of humans or as sacrifice To the long uplift of lions in the blood. Now dogs tear deeply into the living flesh. Each moment is a visible agony, And still the godly human nature remains Unharmed. I never imagined the sheer frail Of fear so powerful. Legs and sinews turn Into flowers. Between her breasts, the Goddess Shelters one such, one blood violet alive. The porch of heaven is littered with color. As familiar as the moon, our humanness Crosses into heaven as the new poem. On the far side of becoming, a life’s work Begins another kind of work, but naked Of change. There are animals, water and trees. Nothing is recognizable in its old Skin, yet everything shimmers. I am afraid, Shrinking from the teeth of the cold water And from the howling trees. I perish at this point Down among dogs and upwards beside lion. The pieces of me are carried fast away By plot and rhyme. See Artemis bathing. The moonlight on her body is the mother Of God. It makes perfect sense. I am eaten And fed changeless into her breast, blood Violet alive. I remain your friend.

Wherever the earth is crag and scrub, the goats are there—the black ones, girlishly skipping, leaping their little leaps from rock to rock. I’ve loved their nerve and frisk since I was small. Once my grandfather gave me one of my own. He showed me how I could serve myself when I got hungry, from the full-feeling bags there like warmish wineskins, where I’d let my hands linger some before bringing my mouth close, so the milk wouldn’t go to waste on my face, my neck, even my naked chest, which did happen sometimes, who knows if on purpose, my mind dwelling all the while on the savory-smelling vulva zinha. I called her Maltesa; she was my horse; I could almost say she was my first woman.

If I don't say it someone will: the wind blows through the goldenrod like death flows through a crowd. I watch it from a distance as the whole field lifts and stirs. Close up, it holds the promise of a less than perfect world. I knew the thing before I knew its name. Now all I know is what the name infers: a life of pure sensation or the rod some angel brings— announcing a momentous death or birth, each face expectant, brightly-lit. I say the name and what it means until the meaning blurs. The wind blows through the goldenrod like death flows through a crowd. Nothing is accomplished and the world is changed by it.

Gone, gone again, May, June, July, And August gone, Again gone by, Not memorable Save that I saw them go, As past the empty quays The rivers flow. And now again, In the harvest rain, The Blenheim oranges Fall grubby from the trees, As when I was young— And when the lost one was here— And when the war began To turn young men to dung. Look at the old house, Outmoded, dignified, Dark and untenanted, With grass growing instead Of the footsteps of life, The friendliness, the strife; In its beds have lain Youth, love, age, and pain: I am something like that; Only I am not dead, Still breathing and interested In the house that is not dark:— I am something like that: Not one pane to reflect the sun, For the schoolboys to throw at— They have broken every one.

Jerk that bitch, urges my guide, and I give my shuddering pole a jerk, hooking the throat of the first steelhead of my life. Reel 'em, he mutters and revs the motor. I horse my pole and reel and horse. The boat's mascot whines, her claws clicking.Let it take some line. My father, uncle, and cousin are reeling.First fish! they shout, and I shout,What a fighter! A silver spine touches the air. There, he points,a hen. And guess what? She's gonna join the club, somehow spotting in that glimpse the smooth place along her back where a fin had been snipped. He leans over the gunwale, dips a net, and scoops her into the boat. She is thick with a wide band of fiery scales, slap- slapping the aluminum bottom. Welcome to the club, he says, and clobbers her once, and again, and once more before she goes still. A bleeder, he says, shaking his head and handing her to me. I curl a finger through a gill the way you're supposed to, determined not to let her slip and flop back to the river, a blunder I'd never live down. A good fist. Fish, I mean. A good fish.