1630 Nature poems

She knew what she was and so was capable of anything anyone could imagine. She loved what she was, there for the taking, imagine. She imagined nothing. She loved nothing more than what she had, which was enough for her, which was more than any man could handle.

I heard a cough as if a thief was there outside my sleep a sharp intake of air a fox in her fox-fur stepping across the grass in her black gloves barked at my house just so abrupt and odd the way she went hungrily asking in the heart's thick accent in such serious sleepless trespass she came a woman with a man's voice but no name as if to say: it's midnight and my life is laid beneath my children like gold leaf

Tulip, you Bled on my green rug. A jungle-red petal Where my little kits Rollick, fallen like a warning— Yesterday I sat outside In the returned sun Trying to make more Friends; after all these years To think of yourself Snapped, the sweet sap Tremoring between States of ice and melt. An old love wrote to me From his wife’s country place To say he had been hunting there And could appreciate the hounds; In a white coat he is closely Setting people’s bones, opening Their backs with the hands I knew The cancellated paths Of saying no or yes: I could have fallen To a fearing of the little foxes lately Come into the yard (There is so little I know about what to do) But I let them be.

On a road through the mountains with a friend many years ago I came to a curve on a slope where a clear stream flowed down flashing across dark rocks through its own echoes that could neither be caught nor forgotten it was the turning of autumn and already the mornings were cold with ragged clouds in the hollows long after sunrise but the pasture sagging like a roof the glassy water and flickering yellow leaves in the few poplars and knotted plum trees were held up in a handful of sunlight that made the slates on the silent mill by the stream glisten white above their ruin and a few relics of the life before had been arranged in front of the open mill house to wait pale in the daylight out on the open mountain after whatever they had been made for was over the dew was drying on them and there were few who took that road who might buy one of them and take it away somewhere to be unusual to be the only one to become unknown a wooden bed stood there on rocks a cradle the color of dust a cracked oil jar iron pots wooden wheels iron wheels stone wheels the tall box of a clock and among them a ring of white stone the size of an embrace set into another of the same size an iron spike rising from the ring where the wooden handle had fitted that turned it in its days as a hand mill you could see if you looked closely that the top ring that turned in the other had been carved long before in the form of a fox lying nose in tail seeming to be asleep the features worn almost away where it had gone around and around grinding grain and salt to go into the dark and to go on and remember * * * What I thought I had left I kept finding again but when I went looking for what I thought I remembered as anyone could have foretold it was not there when I went away looking for what I had to do I found that I was living where I was a stranger but when I retraced my steps the familiar vision turned opaque and all surface and in the wrong places and the places where I had been a stranger appeared to me to be where I had been at home called by name and answering getting ready to go away and going away * * * Every time they assembled and he spoke to them about waking there was an old man who stood listening and left before the others until one day the old man stayed and Who are you he asked the old man and the old man answered I am not a man many lives ago I stood where you are standing and they assembled in front of me and I spoke to them about waking until one day one of them asked me When someone has wakened to what is really there is that person free of the chain of consequences and I answered yes and with that I turned into a fox and I have been a fox for five hundred lives and now I have come to ask you to say what will free me from the body of a fox please tell me when someone has wakened to what is really there is that person free of the chain of consequences and this time the answer was That person sees it as it is then the old man said Thank you for waking me you have set me free of the body of the fox which you will find on the other side of the mountain I ask you to bury it please as one of your own that evening he announced a funeral service for one of them but they said nobody has died then he led them to the other side of the mountain and a cave where they found a fox’s body and he told them the story and they buried the fox as one of them but later one of them asked what if he had given the right answer every time * * * Once again I was there and once again I was leaving and again it seemed as though nothing had changed even while it was all changing but this time was a time of ending this time the long marriage was over the orbits were flying apart it was autumn again sunlight tawny in the fields where the shadows each day grew longer and the still afternoons ripened the distance until the sun went down across the valley and the full moon rose out of the trees it was the time of year when I was born and that evening I went to see friends for the last time and I came back after midnight along the road white with the moon I was crossing the bars of shadow and seeing ahead of me the wide silent valley full of silver light and there just at the corner of the land that I had come back to so many times and now was leaving at the foot of the wall built of pale stone I saw the body stretched in the grass and it was a fox a vixen just dead with no sign of how it had come to happen no blood the long fur warm in the dewy grass nothing broken or lost or torn or unfinished I carried her home to bury her in the garden in the morning of the clear autumn that she had left and to stand afterward in the turning daylight * * * There are the yellow beads of the stonecrops and the twisted flags of dried irises knuckled into the hollows of moss and rubbly limestone on the waves of the low wall the ivy has climbed along them where the weasel ran the light has kindled to gold the late leaves of the cherry tree over the lane by the house chimney there is the roof and the window looking out over the garden summer and winter there is the field below the house there is the broad valley far below them all with the curves of the river a strand of sky threaded through it and the notes of bells rising out of it faint as smoke and there beyond the valley above the rim of the wall the line of mountains I recognize like a line of writing that has come back when I had thought it was forgotten

As some vast Tropic tree, itself a wood, That crests its Head with clouds, beneath the flood Feeds its deep roots, and with the bulging flank Of its wide base controls the fronting bank, (By the slant current's pressure scoop'd away The fronting bank becomes a foam-piled bay) High in the Fork the uncouth Idol knits His channel'd Brows; low murmurs stir by fits And dark below the horrid Faquir sits; An Horror from its broad Head's branchy wreath Broods o'er the rude Idolatry beneath—

The Moon, how definite its orb! Yet gaze again, and with a steady gaze— 'Tis there indeed,—but where is it not?— It is suffused o'er all the sapphire Heaven, Trees, herbage, snake-like stream, unwrinkled Lake, Whose very murmur does of it partake And low and close the broad smooth mountain Is more a thing of Heaven than when Distinct by one dim shade and yet undivided from the universal cloud In which it towers, finite in height.

Water and windmills, greenness, Islets green;— Willows whose Trunks beside the shadows stood Of their own higher half, and willowy swamp:— Farmhouses that at anchor seem'd—in the inland sky The fog-transfixing Spires— Water, wide water, greenness and green banks, And water seen—

for Jerry Estrin Snow covers The hills one by one Our neighborhood Characters become San Francisco 1874 Words later language A photograph At home when Light writes 1974 Or 1979 We move where The Lives of My Books Pages accumulate Not legible as themselves Historical time 1989 Startled leaves us Unafraid though Overgrown Died in 1993 Moved in 1994 In pink stone Earlier in "The Park" Wrote shells and cherubs The cathedral The fountain

Stuck pat with strawberry magnets to her sub-zero are all the stages: gill slits, lungs, sex—stopped at the third month, when the fetus is sucked out into a clear plastic bag. Reaching in for a quick soda, you can almost feel that flexible wind on your face. The fetus (named Jennifer, it says) develops in color-photo sequence till the second trimester, when (more bold-face) the kid's a murder victim, in cold blood, of Mom. You beckon to nothing: milk cartons, cans, stand in the chill blast of the suction door and grab your Sprite. Day and night she stands outside the clinics with the other Lifers. My advice: don't take her on. I once learned phylogeny provides intelligent options—but survival does not always select for insight. Down the line: there's a smug printed sign talking up adoption: Right. So, knocked up, I'd owe my body to an forgiving god, who'd swallow my offspring t00? Here's a fat man rattling a blood red genie in a pickle jar. No wedding ring. See that woman, head bent—they're hurrying her through the police cordon, past the screaming faces? I've walked where she's walking now— and where she lies now, I once lay, behind that secured door, near that white waiting table. My mind divided, momentarily, as if the world were just birth or no birth, what I could or could not do and still seem human to myself. Who first fixed in my head that slashed membrane between life and death? (I'd go toe-to-toe against her, but she stops me cold with her small, past due figure of remorse.)God, what next? she asks, leaning against her icebox, her T-shirt shouting how she pities the unborn. So do I. But not as much as I pity her, quickening with hate. And love: for those would-be lives inbred to a set of family gestures. One day on our way to the frog pond we take my daughter's hands, saying nothing—one on each side. She asks me why I don't see what she believes. I want to say I do, I see through all the cross- wielding apologists to why she, alone in her kitchen, grieves. It's sad. The big frogs croak like TV preachers pad to pad. But look: at the pond rim she points out tadpoles—hundredsm ink-black, legless. See? we both say. My daughter kneels, tries to cup them in her fist, but they're too fast. Born again and again into the limits of our perception, they swim intuitively, the way we think. She calls that revelation. We're surrounded by the bull chorus, a booming, backlit percussion.Call it revelation

Up here, with June, the sycamore throws Across the window a whispering screen; I shall miss the sycamore more, I suppose, Than anything else on this earth that is out in green. But I mean to go through the door without fear, Not caring much what happens here When I’m away:— How green the screen is across the panes Or who goes laughing along the lanes With my old lover all summer day.