1630 Nature poems

January. I pluck it, this feather flapping in the high mesquite only head-high, caught by the down, iridescent, turkey. Another feather hugging the ditch along the fence line and another... A coyote somewhere naps happy, grinning like the feather evolved from a leaf. What luck. Clouds lift above the field as if to swallow my eye into hunger. Good hunger. The greatest eye must behold me like an ember dropped into a finch nest, and I smoke at the mouth like a gun dreaming in a safe of a war it can win by virtue of its praise. I have lost the killer phrase I concocted on my country walk with the feather in my pocket. I cock it.

Trailing her father, bearing his hand axe, the girl thought she had never guessed what earthly majesty was before then, as he strode unconcernedly holding a vicious gander by the horny mitts and let the big wings batter his knees. She was also surprised to feel a liberating satisfaction in the coming bloodshed, and that notwithstanding all the times she had been beleaguered and had fled, today she did not fear the barnyard hubub. Yet, as her father’s clever stroke fell, as the pronged head skipped sideways and the neck plumes stiffened with blood from the cleft, she was angry; and, when the headless goose ran to the brook and was carried off into the woods alive, she rejoiced, and subsequently frequented those woods and avoided her father. When the goose began to mend she brought him small hominy, which was welcome though she had to press the kernels one by one into the pink neck that throbbed into her palm; when haemorrhage occurred she would not spare handkerchiefs, and stanching the spot she felt a thrill of sympathy. But for the most part there was steady progress, and growing vigor was accompanied by restlessness, and one cool day the blind thing was batted out of existence by a motorcycle. She had no time for tears. She ran upstairs to miss her father’s barytone commiseration, then out onto the fields, and, holding an old red pinwheel, ran ran ran ran.

The great house birch with its girth he never quite could get his arms around, long felled, at last only its bark like a larva’s husk in grass leaning neck-high, hollow below mansards. He does not live in the peeling mansion, but a more-than-ample keeper’s cottage beyond rolled lawns and relics of Victorian elms where he muses in his study alcove. Touches the ancient coins, silver or bronze, their gleam on the baize-topped writing table — proud Athena helmeted; her owl agog beneath. Eternity glimpsed in the boy ruler Gordian’s profile, copper green. Trees on guard in browed dignity now the seething barrack of bees. Nearby a maple twisted by wind for decades spirals, a stair winding above the cone of shade. In his covert the son, reading Herodotus, Suetonius — staggering run of drachmas, staters, tetradrachms, glinting in rows.

The scent of pig is faint tonight as the lime trees hang their heads against gradations of blue, looking at the lone suitcase in the middle of the farmyard with a sense of solidarity. Also forgotten. Its owner never once looked up at them and exclaimed I was still soft-fingered when I planted you. In the plane, her gaze rests on a flock of cloud-birds, pinkish purple with elongated necks, rests on the plane’s wing-tip colored pink by the sun. Her head is heavy with this childhood cargo, like the hawk that usually flies between or above their branches, found skimming the ground with its catch of mouse or mole, or the barge that passes every day at four, its metal nose just out of the water, while empty at eight, its sleek sides flash signals to those on shore. Later, on the highway a row of trucks lit like orange squares in the setting sun— a colony of ants each with a piece of chrysanthemum on their backs—begins to reassemble memories; the petals become lining, the shape of the flower is lost, so that years later, looking at an old photograph, she will not remember the names of cousins and uncles but the exact bend in the river behind them, the pattern of trees.

Scarlet the poppies Blue the corn-flowers, Golden the wheat. Gold for The Eternal: Blue of Our Lady: Red for the five Wounds of her Son.

Bouteloua black grama grass red chino side- oats blue grama grass hairy buffalo- grass toboso three-awn land’s dawn 旦 sun over sand, tumble wind- mill witch- cup- saltgrass plains love- indiangrass, prairie cordgrass, pink pappusgrass, sprangle- top green knotroot bristle, bluestem, tangle- head, sacaton panicles open, golden drop- seed blooms desert winter- grass, awns twist, un- twist,such syllables flicker out of grass : Nanissáanah thirst, ghost dance native spirits, active roots, footstalks to soil as to site, stems bend, range- lands wave, seiche fields sway, clouds pass over- grazed grass staked, fenced dries, weakens, dies, fallen crowns, the grasslands what comes to pass, ranch- hand lands, live- stock livelihood wildlife gone, displaced, migrations impeded, scales im- balanced the years spread, each itself hitched to everything else in the universe nodes hollowed, drought- land years, drops on the hardpan nature is endless regeneration trichloris, muhly, switch- grass, wind misses 沙 沙shasha through the pass- es, whispering seeds will pass, will pass within leaves listening grasses,not only the revelation but the nature behind

So still at heart, They respond like water To the slightest breeze, Rippling as one body, And, as one mind, Bend continually To listen: The perfect confidants, They keep to themselves, A web of trails and nests, Burrows and hidden entrances— Do not reveal Those camouflaged in stillness From the circling hawks, Or crouched and breathless At the passing of the fox.

To My Noble Friend, Mr. Charles Cotton O thou that swing’st upon the waving hair Of some well-fillèd oaten beard, Drunk every night with a delicious tear Dropped thee from heaven, where now th’ art reared; The joys of earth and air are thine entire, That with thy feet and wings dost hop and fly; And, when thy poppy works, thou dost retire To thy carved acorn-bed to lie. Up with the day, the sun thou welcom’st then, Sport’st in the gilt-plats of his beams, And all these merry days mak’st merry men, Thyself, and melancholy streams. But ah, the sickle! Golden ears are cropped; Ceres and Bacchus bid good night; Sharp, frosty fingers all your flowers have topped, And what scythes spared, winds shave off quite. Poor verdant fool, and now green ice! thy joys, Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass, Bid us lay in ’gainst winter rain, and poise Their floods with an o’erflowing glass. Thou best of men and friends! we will create A genuine summer in each other’s breast, And spite of this cold time and frozen fate, Thaw us a warm seat to our rest. Our sacred hearths shall burn eternally, As vestal flames; the North Wind, he Shall strike his frost-stretched wings, dissolve, and fly This Etna in epitome. Dropping December shall come weeping in, Bewail th’usurping of his reign: But when in showers of old Greek we begin, Shall cry he hath his crown again! Night, as clear Hesper, shall our tapers whip From the light casements where we play, And the dark hag from her black mantle strip, And stick there everlasting day. Thus richer than untempted kings are we, That, asking nothing, nothing need: Though lords of all what seas embrace, yet he That wants himself is poor indeed.

I don’t know somehow it seems sufficient to see and hear whatever coming and going is, losing the self to the victory of stones and trees, of bending sandpit lakes, crescent round groves of dwarf pine: for it is not so much to know the self as to know it as it is known by galaxy and cedar cone, as if birth had never found it and death could never end it: the swamp’s slow water comes down Gravelly Run fanning the long stone-held algal hair and narrowing roils between the shoulders of the highway bridge: holly grows on the banks in the woods there, and the cedars’ gothic-clustered spires could make green religion in winter bones: so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass jail seals each thing in its entity: no use to make any philosophies here: I see no god in the holly, hear no song from the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never heard of trees: surrendered self among unwelcoming forms: stranger, hoist your burdens, get on down the road.

Mildest of all the powers of earth: no lightnings For her—maniacal in the clouds. No need for Signs with their skull and crossbones, chain-link gates: Danger! Keep Out! High Gravity! she’s friendlier. Won’t nurse—unlike the magnetic powers—repugnance; Would reconcile, draw close: her passion’s love. No terrors lurking in her depths, like those Bound in that buzzing strongbox of the atom, Terrors that, lossened, turn the hills vesuvian, Trace in cremation where the cities were. No, she’s our quiet mother, sensible. But therefore down-to-earth, not suffering Fools who play fast and loose among the mountains, Who fly in her face, or, drunken, clown on cornices. She taught our ways of walking. Her affection Adjusted the morning grass, the sands of summer Until our soles fit snug in each, walk easy. Holding her hand, we’re safe. Should that hand fail, The atmosphere we breathe would turn hysterical, Hiss with tornadoes, spinning us from earth Into the cold unbreathable desolations. Yet there—in fields of space—is where she shines, Ring-mistress of the circus of the stars, Their prancing carousels, their ferris wheels Lit brilliant in celebration. Thanks to her All’s gala in the galaxy. Down here she Walks us just right, not like the jokey moon Burlesquing our human stride to kangaroo hops; Not like vast planets, whose unbearable mass Would crush us in a bear hug to their surface And into the surface, flattened. No: deals fairly. Makes happy each with each: the willow bend Just so, the acrobat land true, the keystone Nestle in place for bridge and for cathedral. Let us pick up—or mostly—what we need: Rake, bucket, stone to build with, logs for warmth, The fallen fruit, the fallen child . . . ourselves. Instructs us too in honesty: our jointed Limbs move awry and crisscross, gawky, thwart; She’s all directness and makes that a grace, All downright passion for the core of things, For rectitude, the very ground of being: Those eyes are leveled where the heart is set. See, on the tennis court this August day: How, beyond human error, she’s the one Whose will the bright balls cherish and obey —As if in love. She’s tireless in her courtesies To even the klutz (knees, elbows all a-tangle), Allowing his poky serve Euclidean whimsies, The looniest lob its joy: serene parabolas.