1630 Nature poems

Grown about by fragrant bushes, Sunken in a winding valley, Where the clear winds blow And the shadows come and go, And the cattle stand and low And the sheep bells and the linnets Sing and tinkle musically. Between the past and the future, Those two black infinities Between which our brief life Flashes a moment and goes out.

The jay’s up early, and attacks the lawn with something of that fervor and despair of one whose keys are not where they always are, checking the same spots over and again till something new or overlooked appears— an armored pillbug, or a husk of grain. He flits with it home, where his mate beds down, her stern tail feathers jutting from the nest like a spoon handle from a breakfast bowl. The quickest lover’s peck, and he’s paroled again to stalk the sodgrass, cockheaded, obsessed. He must get something from his selfless work— joy, or reprieve, or a satisfying sense of obligation dutifully dispensed. Unless, of course, he’s just a bird, with beaks— too many beaks—to fill, in no way possessed of traits or demons humans might devise, his dark not filled with could-have-beens and whys.

What we built to hold us, the year's memory, menus and daytrips, after a while came loose. Those nights we balanced on each other's mistakes, cradling our wine: twigs those branches now. Who knew what lived there? She she she called one bird. What lived there knew its place. Another bird splits its nest wide, hinges the gap with spider silk, learning to give, to give, to give until breaking. Only then— either one gives until breaking or one does not.

When the fog slunk in with that salivary, close, coyote panting, its hue a very huelessness, like breath huffed on a glass, like the void stretched and still stretching past where we’d thought it could, we felt less wary. We felt our shoulders loosen, surrendering to phantom hands and softly vanished feet. The sensation was a first and last: sweet to feel the vigilance at last suspending, the chronic stress of constantly pretending to know—have known!—what all the others knew. Loopy, sly, we leered at one another (what we just assumed was one another) and did the things we weren’t supposed to do, grinning as if seated in the back pew of a church that worshipped fuss and bother, a dour church where facial expression of any kind had been prohibited, and where the chinking, hefty plate we shifted hand to hand held such a vast collection of their coin, we pocketed a fraction for when the fog would lift, if it lifted. But stealing from them puts you in their power. Since then we have been paying for that hour.

This sunlight on snow. This decrescendo of covered stumps & brush — stop for it. Stop before the sled end- over-ends down the chin of the hill — the way it always will at the rock ⅔ of the way down. Stop & shiver in it: the ring of snow inside gloves, the cusp of red forehead like a sun just waiting to top the hill. Every ill-built snowball waiting to be thrown, every bell-shaped angel stamped over the brown leaves. When my daughter ranges in winter, she works every dazzling angle — the crestfallen pinecones, the grizzled beards of bushes in the morning, a furnace’s windup huffing in this throat- clearing of snow.

Yet the after is still a storm as witness bent shadbush and cord grass in stillness sand littered with the smallest of fragments whether shell or bone That city we are far from is still frozen, still in ruins (except its symmetries be renewed by sleep, its slant colors redeemed) Nothing has changed but its name and the air that it breathes There’s still no truth in making sense while the ash settles, so fine that planes keep falling from the sky And the name once again to be the old one Saint Something, Saint Gesture, Saint Entirely the Same as if nothing or no one had been nameless in the interim or as if still could be placed beside storm that simply, as in a poem Have you heard the angels with sexed tongues, met the blind boy who could see with his skin, his body curled inward like a phrase, like an after in stillness or a letter erased Have you seen what’s written on him as question to an answer or calendar out of phase Add up the number of such days Add illness and lilt as formed on the tongue Add that scene identical with its negative, that sentence which refuses to speak, present which cannot be found

Gray whale Now that we are sending you to The End That great god Tell him That we who follow you invented forgiveness And forgive nothing I write as though you could understand And I could say it One must always pretend something Among the dying When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks Empty of you Tell him that we were made On another day The bewilderment will diminish like an echo Winding along your inner mountains Unheard by us And find its way out Leaving behind it the future Dead And ours When you will not see again The whale calves trying the light Consider what you will find in the black garden And its court The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless And fore-ordaining as stars Our sacrifices Join your word to theirs Tell him That it is we who are important

Freely beside me the vineyards are running and unbridled Remains the sky. Wildfires trade pinecones and one Donkey bolts uphill for a little cloud St. Heracleitos’s day and something’s up That even noses can’t diagnose: Tricks of a shoeless wind snagging the hem Of Fate’s nightgown and leaving Us in the open air of capricorns exposed Secretly I go with all the loot in my mind For a life unbowed from the beginning. No candles no chandeliers Only a gold anemone’s engagement for a diamond Feeling its way to where? Asking what? Our moon’s half- shadow needs You to console even the graves Homoethnic or not. The crux is that the scent of earth Lost even to bloodhounds With its weeds onions and creeks Must be restored to its idiom So what! A word contains you peasant of night’s green Efessos! Forefather sulphur phosphorus your fourteenth generation Inside the orange groves gold words Sharing the scalpel’s chisel Tents as yet unpitched others midair Lost poles suddenly grinding. Sermons Rise from the seafloor of the facing coves Twin scythes for theater or temple Fresh valley springs and other curly streams Of thus and so. If ever wisdom Planned circles of clover and dog grass Another world might live just as before your fingerprint Letters will exist. People will read and grab History’s tail once more. Just let the vineyards gallop and the sky remain Unbridled as children want it With roosters and pinecones and blue kites flags On Saint Heracleitos’s day child’s is the kingdom.

I know that rarity precedes extinction, Like that of the purple orchid in my garden, Whose sudden disappearance rattled me. Jane, in her way, is also beautiful. And therefore near extinction, I suppose. She is certainly rare and fragile of  bone. She insists she is dying, day by dubious day, And spends her evenings looking at photographs Of  her mother, who never believed in love. Rare Jane, I worship you. But I can’t deny You access to the endless With its river of cold stars.

I think he knows I’m alive, having come down The three steps of the back porch And given me a good once over. All afternoon He’s been moving back and forth, Gathering odd bits of walnut shells and twigs, While all about him the great fields tumble To the blades of the thresher. He’s lucky To be where he is, wild with all that happens. He’s lucky he’s not one of the shadows Living in the blond heart of the wheat. This autumn when trees bolt, dark with the fires Of starlight, he’ll curl among their roots, Wanting nothing but the slow burn of matter On which he fastens like a small, brown flame.