1630 Nature poems

Among the many lives you’ll never lead, consider that of the wolverine, for whom avalanche is opportunity, who makes a festival of frozen marrow from the femur of an elk, who wears the crooked North Star like an amulet of teeth. In the game of which animal would you return as, today I’m thinking snowshoe hare, a scuffle in the underbrush, one giant leap. You never see them coming and going, only the crosshairs of their having passed, ascending the ridge, lost or not lost in succession forests giving way to open meadow where deep snow lingers and finally relents, uncovering acres of lily — glacier yellow, avalanche white — daylight restaking its earthly claim. Every season swallows someone — Granite Mountain with its blunderbuss gullies, Tatoosh a lash on the tongue, those climbers caught if not unawares then perfectly hapless, not thinking of riding that snowstorm to the summit, not thinking wolverine fever in the shivering blood, not thinking steelhead cutthroat rainbow or the languid river that will carry them out.

If an idea exists but is never found, then the stained-glass windows will reflect nothing back to the ear. Most days filter through the mind, waiting not for movement but for a road to be built, brick by brick, word by word, weariness replaced with joy, but what is joy without the years and the way they open constantly, two or three hearts pumping a volume of blood meant for just one? Our disbelief in the ordinary emerges from the way we color routine: leaves pile up depending on the wind, but why pause to notice? Eventually the seasons embrace what our words will not, the illuminated day just one of a thousand others, and the names we give back to the world mean ultimately little against the way the sun pleads sense from the smallest cradle of dew.

They will soon be down To one, but he still will be For a little while    still will be stopping The flakes in the air with a look, Surrounding himself with the silence Of whitening snarls. Let him eat The last red meal of the condemned To extinction, tearing the guts From an elk. Yet that is not enough For me. I would have him eat The heart, and from it, have an idea Stream into his gnarling head That he no longer has a thing To lose, and so can walk Out into the open, in the full Pale of the sub-Arctic sun Where a single spruce tree is dying Higher and higher. Let him climb it With all his meanness and strength. Lord, we have come to the end Of this kind of vision of heaven, As the sky breaks open Its fans around him and shimmers And into its northern gates he rises Snarling    complete    in the joy of a weasel With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach Looking straight into the eternal Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all My way: at the top of that tree I place The New World’s last eagle Hunched in mangy feathers    giving Up on the theory of flight. Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate To the death in the rotten branches, Let the tree sway and burst into flame And mingle them, crackling with feathers, In crownfire. Let something come Of it    something gigantic    legendary Rise beyond reason over hills Of ice screaming that it cannot die, That it has come back, this time On wings, and will spare no earthly thing: That it will hover, made purely of northern Lights, at dusk    and fall On men building roads: will perch On the moose’s horn like a falcon Riding into battle    into holy war against Screaming railroad crews: will pull Whole traplines like fibres from the snow In the long-jawed night of fur trappers. But, small, filthy, unwinged, You will soon be crouching Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion Of being the last, but none of how much Your unnoticed going will mean: How much the timid poem needs The mindless explosion of your rage, The glutton’s internal fire    the elk’s Heart in the belly, sprouting wings, The pact of the “blind swallowing Thing,” with himself, to eat The world, and not to be driven off it Until it is gone, even if it takes Forever. I take you as you are And make of you what I will, Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty Non-survivor. Lord, let me die    but not die Out.

All our stones like as much sun as possible. Along their joints run both solar access and decline In equal splendor, like a mica chipping At every beat, being sun responsible. How much sun then do you think is due them? Or should say, how much sun do you think they are apt to have? It has misted at their roots for some days now, The gray glamour addressing itself to them. I should think possible that it go on misting likewise A good way into next year, or time as they have it, A regular cool season every day for our stones. Not a streak that low of any sun or longed surprise.

Today I left groceries by the playground on Hudson and tried to haul, up toward my block, a cross section of a maple grown too large, chainsawed into manhole covers. Alphonso, Super for All Buildings east of the projects, stopped sweeping. He leaned his bald broom against the stoop, nudged the wood with his toe. “Nothing to do but roll it,” he said, hands deep in his pockets. I nodded, barely believing my luck in the midst of asphalt, transistor radios, and the wet smell of dogs as he squatted eye level with the log, heaved it against his shoulder like a man who bears a handmade cross for miles on his pentitent back. I saw a kind of glory in his eyes, he understood the heft of the trunk, nicks in the damp bark. I stood on the side and righted the thing and together we rolled this boulder of tree past the Indian deli, the Russian shoe repair, the Caribbean bakery. “You can smell the forest,” he said, as we reached my stoop, wood in the crook of his neck, sawdust and humus and sweat. And we hoisted the thing, one step at a time, stopping only to breathe the scent of sap and after a good half hour it was filling the whole of my apartment— the shade, the damp smell, that enormous presence— light brown rings so perfect my whole life fell right down inside them, concentric circles, tree within tree, the single slab a world within itself— suddenly it was thirty-five years ago: I stood on the edge of a forest, someplace upstate, and looked up into the branches of my first true and majestic tree, in the first real forest—trees instead of buildings. Oh the breadth of those limbs— after the taut geometry of elevator, fire escape, lobby, to see through branches to the sun—I believed the world was mine, there was sap in my veins, the tree was limitless, the scent of the tree, the bark and the branch and the six-year-old sightline, which goes on to the edge of the known world.

Men who have hardly uncurled from their posture in the womb. Naked. Heads bowed, not in prayer, but in contemplation of the earth they came from, that suckled them on the brown milk that builds bone not brain. Who called them forth to walk in the green light, their thoughts on darkness? Their women, who are not Madonnas, have babes at the breast with the wise, time-ridden faces of the Christ child in a painting by a Florentine master. The warriors prepare poison with love’s care for the Sebastians of their arrows. They have no God, but follow the contradictions of a ritual that says life must die that life may go on. They wear flowers in their hair.

I’m practicing my I-belong-here no-twig-snap no-leaf-rustle no-branch-crack see-all, know-all float-like-fog like-smoke pine-needle-soft forest walk. No one will know I’m coming. No one will know when I’m gone.

Equisetum, horsetail, railway weed Laid down in the unconscious of the hills; Three hundred million years still buried In this hair-soft surviving growth that kills Everything in the glorious garden except itself, That thrives on starvation, and distils Black diamonds, the carboniferous shelf — That was life before our animals, With trilobite and coelacanth, A stratum of compressed time that tells Truth without language and is the body store Of fire, heat, night without intervals — That becomes people's living only when strange air Fills out the folded lungs, the inert corpuscles. Into the mute dark, light crawls once more. * So the hills must be pillaged and cored. Such history as they hide must be hacked out Urgent as money, the buried black seams uncovered. Rows of stunted houses under the smoke, Soot black houses pressed back hard against pit By fog, by smoke, by a cobra hood of smouldering coke Swayed from the nest of ovens huddled opposite. Families, seven or ten to a household, Growing up, breathing it, becoming it. On winter mornings, grey capped men in the cold, Clatter of boots on tarmac, sharp and empty, First shift out in thick frost simple as gold On the sulphurous roofs, on the stilted gantry, Crossing to engine house and winding gear — Helmet, pick, lamp, tin bottle of tea. A Nan or Nora slave to each black grate. Washing on Monday, the water grimed in its well. Iron and clean on Tuesday, roll out and bake Each Wednesday (that sweet bituminous smell No child who grew up here forgets). Thursdays, the Union and the Methodist Circle; Fishday on Friday (fryday), a queue of kids, Thin, squabbling by the chippy. Resurfaced quarrels After pay day — hard drinking and broken heads. Wheels within wheels, an England of working Ezekiels. Between slag-heaps, coke-tarns and black sludgy leavings, Forges roaring and reddening, hot irons glowing like jewels. No more, no more. They've swept up the workings As if they were never meant to be part of memory. A once way of being. A dead place. Hard livings That won't return, grim tales forgot as soon as told, Streaming from the roofs in smoke from a lost century — A veil of breath in which to survive the cold. * When the mine's shut down, habits prolong the story, Habits and voices, till grandmothers' old ways pass, And the terraces fold into themselves, so black, ugly And unloved that all but the saved (success Has spared them, the angel of death-by-money) move away. The town's inhabited by alien, washed up innocents. Children and animals, people too poor to stay Anywhere else, stray, dazed, into this slum of Eden. the church is without saints or statuary. The memorial is a pick, a hammer, a shovel, given By the men of Harvey Seam and Victoria Seam. May Their good bones wake in the living seams of Heaven. He breaketh open a shaft away from where men sojourn. They are forgotten of the foot that passeth by.

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee, Walled round with rocks as an inland island, The ghost of a garden fronts the sea. A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses The steep square slope of the blossomless bed Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses Now lie dead. The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken, To the low last edge of the long lone land. If a step should sound or a word be spoken, Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand? So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless, Through branches and briars if a man make way, He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless Night and day. The dense hard passage is blind and stifled That crawls by a track none turn to climb To the strait waste place that the years have rifled Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time. The thorns he spares when the rose is taken; The rocks are left when he wastes the plain. The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken, These remain. Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not; As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry; From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not, Could she call, there were never a rose to reply. Over the meadows that blossom and wither Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song; Only the sun and the rain come hither All year long. The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath. Only the wind here hovers and revels In a round where life seems barren as death. Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping, Haply, of lovers none ever will know, Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping Years ago. Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither," Did he whisper? "look forth from the flowers to the sea; For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither, And men that love lightly may die—but we?" And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened, And or ever the garden's last petals were shed, In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened, Love was dead. Or they loved their life through, and then went whither? And were one to the end—but what end who knows? Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither, As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose. Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them? What love was ever as deep as a grave? They are loveless now as the grass above them Or the wave. All are at one now, roses and lovers, Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea. Not a breath of the time that has been hovers In the air now soft with a summer to be. Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep, When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter We shall sleep. Here death may deal not again for ever; Here change may come not till all change end. From the graves they have made they shall rise up never, Who have left nought living to ravage and rend. Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing, While the sun and the rain live, these shall be; Till a last wind's breath upon all these blowing Roll the sea. Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble, Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink, Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink, Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead.

Taken: “duck foot skin; an owl with five owlets; nesting minks; caught in a fish trap. A bird egg found in winter.”