1630 Nature poems

M.A.K. September, 1880-September, 1955 As I wandered on the beach I saw the heron standing Sunk in the tattered wings He wore as a hunchback’s coat. Shadow without a shadow, Hung on invisible wires From the top of a canvas day, What scissors cut him out? Superimposed on a poster Of summer by the strand Of a long-decayed resort, Poised in the dusty light Some fifteen summers ago; I wondered, an empty child, “Heron, whose ghost are you?” I stood on the beach alone, In the sudden chill of the burned. My thought raced up the path. Pursuing it, I ran To my mother in the house And led her to the scene. The spectral bird was gone. But her quick eye saw him drifting Over the highest pines On vast, unmoving wings. Could they be those ashen things, So grounded, unwieldy, ragged, A pair of broken arms That were not made for flight? In the middle of my loss I realized she knew: My mother knew what he was. O great blue heron, now That the summer house has burned So many rockets ago, So many smokes and fires And beach-lights and water-glow Reflecting pinwheel and flare: The old logs hauled away, The pines and driftwood cleared From that bare strip of shore Where dozens of children play; Now there is only you Heavy upon my eye. Why have you followed me here, Heavy and far away? You have stood there patiently For fifteen summers and snows, Denser than my repose, Bleaker than any dream, Waiting upon the day When, like grey smoke, a vapor Floating into the sky, A handful of paper ashes, My mother would drift away.

An owl once perched in my tree at night (when most birds cannot see). But when the sun rose, he was found by some crows, and their caws caused the owl to flee.

Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange.  Nay, it is deeper than my sister’s depth and stronger than my brother’s strength, and stranger than the strangeness of my madness. Aeons upon aeons have passed since the first grey dawn made us visible to one another; and though we have seen the birth and the fullness and the death of many worlds, we are still eager and young. We are young and eager and yet we are mateless and unvisited, and though we lie in unbroken half embrace, we are uncomforted.  And what comfort is there for controlled desire and unspent passion? Whence shall come the flaming god to warm my sister’s bed?  And what she-torrent shall quench my brother’s fire?  And who is the woman that shall command my heart? In the stillness of the night my sister murmurs in her sleep the fire-god’s unknown name, and my brother calls afar upon the cool and distant goddess.  But upon whom I call in my sleep I know not. *        *         * Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange.

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance of the purple-tongued sand goanna, for there the magnificent translation of tenacity into bone and grace occurs. And some declare it to be an expansive desert—solid rust-orange rock like dusk captured on earth in stone— simply for the perfect contrast it provides to the blue-grey ridge of rain in the distant hills. Some claim the harmonics of shifting electron rings to be most rare and some the complex motion of seven sandpipers bisecting the arcs and pitches of come and retreat over the mounting hayfield. Others, for grandeur, choose the terror of lightning peals on prairies or the tall collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas, because there they feel dwarfed and appropriately helpless; others select the serenity of that ceiling/cellar of stars they see at night on placid lakes, because there they feel assured and universally magnanimous. But it is the dark emptiness contained in every next moment that seems to me the most singularly glorious gift, that void which one is free to fill with processions of men bearing burning cedar knots or with parades of blue horses, belled and ribboned and stepping sideways, with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies of black-robed choristers; to fill simply with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried crockery, tangerine and almond custards, polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing walls; that space large enough to hold all invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000 definitions of god and more, never fully filled, never.

Stivenson Magloire Amidst the glossy dark green foliage of trees around the hotel pool, I spy a low-hanging golden fruit. So many trees whose names I do not know and for the first time do not care to learn. The overwhelming now in its countless inflections cancels vocabulary: eyes lips skin instead of words. Still in the pool, floating on my back as the sun gets low, I look at the mango, if that is what it is (I think it is some wholly other fruit), and suddenly smell garlic sautéed in butter. Chefs in the kitchen under the trees are getting the hors d’oeuvres ready. Yesterday in a dim, airless gallery, following your lead, I hunted down an iconography written in a grisly alphabet yet full of life, the haunting gaze direct, transcending death. Death had in winning lost. Art trumped death and life trumped art. Last night (our third together — sleep a whole new texture in a bed with you) I gave you space and found myself at the border of a far province in the king-sized bed, a dimly lit hinterland where paintings ruled, a region wholly devoted to the work of the same painter, mysteriously killed, stoned to death (“lapidated” was one word), assassinated — why? A mystery to be solved by iconography? Death had won but also death had lost. Garlic and butter. Glossy dark green leaves. Voices across the pool. A hanging fruit. An azure splash. And as the sun goes down, you sit by the window in our room, drawing pictures of this this this time. What to call it? Colors in your hands trump words. Like the fruit, like the solution to the mystery, something I am at a loss to name.

Green groweth the holly, So doth the ivy. Though winter blasts blow never so high, Green groweth the holly. As the holly groweth green And never changeth hue, So I am, ever hath been, Unto my lady true. As the holly groweth green With ivy all alone When flowers cannot be seen And greenwood leaves be gone, Now unto my lady Promise to her I make, From all other only To her I me betake. Adieu, mine own lady, Adieu, my special Who hath my heart truly Be sure, and ever shall.

Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed Their snow-white blossoms on my head, With brightest sunshine round me spread Of spring's unclouded weather, In this sequestered nook how sweet To sit upon my orchard-seat! And birds and flowers once more to greet, My last year's friends together. One have I marked, the happiest guest In all this covert of the blest: Hail to Thee, far above the rest In joy of voice and pinion! Thou, Linnet! in thy green array, Presiding Spirit here to-day, Dost lead the revels of the May; And this is thy dominion. While birds, and butterflies, and flowers, Make all one band of paramours, Thou, ranging up and down the bowers, Art sole in thy employment: A Life, a Presence like the Air, Scattering thy gladness without care, Too blest with any one to pair; Thyself thy own enjoyment. Amid yon tuft of hazel trees, That twinkle to the gusty breeze, Behold him perched in ecstasies, Yet seeming still to hover; There! where the flutter of his wings Upon his back and body flings Shadows and sunny glimmerings, That cover him all over. My dazzled sight he oft deceives, A brother of the dancing leaves; Then flits, and from the cottage-eaves Pours forth his song in gushes; As if by that exulting strain He mocked and treated with disdain The voiceless Form he chose to feign, While fluttering in the bushes.

They lie under stars in a field. They lie under rain in a field. Under sun. Some people are like this as well— like a painting hidden beneath another painting. An unexpected weight the sign of their ripeness.

In June, amid the golden fields, I saw a groundhog lying dead. Dead lay he; my senses shook, And mind outshot our naked frailty. There lowly in the vigorous summer His form began its senseless change, And made my senses waver dim Seeing nature ferocious in him. Inspecting close his maggots’ might And seething cauldron of his being, Half with loathing, half with a strange love, I poked him with an angry stick. The fever arose, became a flame And Vigour circumscribed the skies, Immense energy in the sun, And through my frame a sunless trembling. My stick had done nor good nor harm. Then stood I silent in the day Watching the object, as before; And kept my reverence for knowledge Trying for control, to be still, To quell the passion of the blood; Until I had bent down on my knees Praying for joy in the sight of decay. And so I left; and I returned In Autumn strict of eye, to see The sap gone out of the groundhog, But the bony sodden hulk remained. But the year had lost its meaning, And in intellectual chains I lost both love and loathing, Mured up in the wall of wisdom. Another summer took the fields again Massive and burning, full of life, But when I chanced upon the spot There was only a little hair left, And bones bleaching in the sunlight Beautiful as architecture; I watched them like a geometer, And cut a walking stick from a birch. It has been three years, now. There is no sign of the groundhog. I stood there in the whirling summer, My hand capped a withered heart, And thought of China and of Greece, Of Alexander in his tent; Of Montaigne in his tower, Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

This water flows dark red from alder tannin: boot-stain river between white rocks. An ouzel, flannel-feathered, sips the current up. Mossgatherers spread their patches across a dry, flat turnaround. They seem embarrassed, want to shelter in the dark. A coyote running in broad day; stumps ruffling with sulphur polypores woodsy to the tongue, woody to teeth. Early yellow leaves paste river to its bed; blackberries drop, the last, many out of taste and strictly smudge. Puddles loop in the road: Bottomland— the foolhen waits there for the fool gun, gray throat-down free in a burst, the pose, the afterslump. Carcass beside spirit. O come to my hand, unkillable; whatever continues, continue to approach.