1630 Nature poems

(Skellig Michael) does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world…then (heading back) we were pursued by terrors, ghost from Michael… George Bernard Shaw I The ferry furrows the foam, leaving a wake that quickly settles and forgets us, as it has forgotten all those who’ve opened these waters: fisherman, monk, pilgrim and pagan, some foundering here. Our mainland world diminishes. There is respite. A cloud engulfs us out of nowhere as if the miraculous were about to appear. The veil lifts to reveal the small Skellig and Skellig Michael rising like chapel and cathedral. II We forget speech, hypnotized by the climb, concentrating on narrow, rock-hewn steps that spiral up like the gyres of the Book of Kells, whirling in labyrinths of knowledge, turmoil and eternity. They lead to the beehive huts and oratories packed with a congregation of sightseers who whisper in disbelief and reverence at how those sometime monks lived in this wind-tugged cloister of shells. We browse in each dome’s live absence and picnic above the graveyard that’s no bigger than a currach with a crucifix for helmsman navigating his crew to the island of the dead. We’re eyed by the staunch, monkish puffins. Our tongues loosen, but, in keeping with the somberness of this sun-haloed place, we chat about the world with an earnestness that would embarrass us on the mainland. You tell of medieval monks charting world maps with countries drawn as humans gorging upon each other’s entangled bodies. We go on to the lands and demons of the world of poetry. I’m flummoxed when you ask what poetry is. I recall how the earliest musical instruments were hewn out of bones, and that poets carve their words out of those gone before. They are the primitive musicians who beat and blow words back to life. More than that I don’t know. III […] That dusk at Dún an Óir we slaughtered even the pregnant, whimpering women methodically while a bloodstained sun drowned in the ocean. Each fetus struggled in the belly of each slain mother as desperately as a lobster dropped in a boiling pot. Had shed blood been ink, I could still be quilling The Faerie Queene, but I did not allow a drop to blot a mere sonnet that you, trapped in complicity, can never quite break free of. Admit it, hypocrite! In your time few are not guilty of slaughter. Even the page you’ll pen this upon is of pine that Amazonians were shot for. I could go on. (Edmund Spenser) I lifted the pitch of my grief above the storm-lashing waves for my world breaking on the reefs of foreign, land-grabbing knaves, who ignore dependence upon the lowliest plants and creatures as the hermit crab and cloak anemone depend on one another. But no matter what, you must keen for the world’s theft as I keened mine, despite knowing soon no one may be left. (Aodhagán Ó Rathaille) Lend an ear to one of your own kind and do not let yourself be caught by the winds of lust, like Dante’s starlings blown this way and that by every gust. I myself was borne on this wind as I rode across country, always wary that around the next bend my life would catch up with me. My rakish ways squandered energy that I should have instilled in song, more worthy of the muse-gift given to me than my odd aisling, Pay particular heed to me, especially since your word-talent is less than mine. I’m still too bushed to eke out a last line. (Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin) Sing up front, cold-shouldering the fashionable low key of your time, closed, cautious and crabbit as a farmer. Sing as open-throated as my curlew keen. I supped the red wine of Art’s blood as he lay slain, already becoming Cork mud. Sing as full-throated as my unmatched plaint; matching my words to his cold body that would never again rouse to my touch. My hands wept that day’s icy rain as I swore to undo that kowtowing dribble of a man who slew my Art of the winged white horse. The spirit of that mare I rode fleeter than any hare, fleeter than any deer, fleeter than the wind through Munster’s open country. Sing your provenance, our elder province. (Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill) I sang not for my own or for beauty's sake as much as to keep our spirits fired, knowing as long as we sang we'd not break, refusing to allow the country be shired. But it was too much when even our lands turned hostile and drove us like lapwings in the hard winter, together in dying bands, our swollen bellies pregnant with nothing. Even the birds seemed to give up singing. So I lay down and relinquished song. But I should have kept up my amhrán-ing, adapting and transmuting their tongue. Transform the spirit of where you belong, make something right out of what's wrong. (Tomás Rua Ó Súilleabháin) Tell of those weather-sketched Attic islanders who half-tamed their school of rocky Blaskets, water spouting from the blowholes of cliffs. Tell how they were forced from their Ithaca, still dreaming in the surf-rush of Irish, the inland longing for the lilt of the sea. In them uncover the destiny of everyone, for all are exiled and in search of a home, as you settle the eroding island of each poem. (Robin Flower) […] The islands' standing army of gannets fiercely snap, stab and peck one another. Few could match the spite I unleashed on any who encroached into my territory. I spat with petrel accuracy. I should have had the wisdom of the sad-eyed puffins who let everyone come close, sensing few mean hurt, though when forced to tussle they'll show their worth. So learn from me. When I come to mind don't recall how, feisty, I knocked nests of words over the edge, splattering on the rocks the crude squwaks of other ravaging, wing-elbowing birds; rather think of the winged poems I hatched, seen, regardless of time and place, gliding and gyring with their own grace. (Patrick Kavanagh) Life when it is gone is like a woman you were glad to be quit of only to find yourself years later longing for her, catching her scent on a crowded street. Tell us of the seagull plundering your picnic before it wakes you. Tell us of the rain tapping a pane while you're ensconced by the fire cradling a pregnant brandy glass. (Louis MacNeice) Can you still hear a distant train whistle blow? Wet my whistle with a slug of Guinness. What is the texture of fresh-fallen snow? Do girls still wear their hair in braid? What's tea? What's the smell of the sea? Tell me. Tell me. I am beginning to fade. (Dylan Thomas) IV The alarming, silhouetted bird has a preternatural quality as it flutters about my head, drawing me from sleep's underworld. I resist its pull. Everything turns into dream's usual montage. Another figure emerges but says nothing, as if that's what he came to say. His face merges into one of a gagged female. She shimmers and vanishes. Dolphins break beyond Blind Man's Cove, returning the dead to Bull Island, transmitting their encrypted, underwater Morse. The savant local ferryman informs us that Skellig Michael was once a druidic site. His oil-wrinkled hands tug the engine cord, coaxing our boat out of the cliff-shaded cove. We withdraw into the distance, leaving a disgruntling sense that we've only touched the tip of these dark icebergs.

Cold wind comes out of the white hills and rubs itself against the walls of the condominium with an esophogeal vowel sound, and a loneliness creeps into the conversation by the hot tub. We don’t deserve pleasure just as we don’t deserve pain, but it’s pure sorcery the way the feathers of warm mist keep rising from the surface of the water to wrap themselves around a sculpted clavicle or wrist. It’s not just that we are on the eighth story of the world looking out through glass and steel with a clarity of vision in which imported coffee and a knowledge of French painting are combined, but that we are atop a pyramid of all the facts that make this possible: the furnace that heats the water, the truck that hauled the fuel, the artery of highway blasted through the mountains, the heart attack of the previous owner, the history of Western medicine that failed to save him, the successful development of tourism, the snow white lotions that counteract the chemistry of chlorine upon skin—our skin. Down inside history’s body, the slaves are still singing in the dark; the roads continue to be built; the wind blows and the building grips itself in anticipation of the next strong gust. So an enormous act of forgetting is required simply to kiss someone or to open your mouth for the fork of high-calorie paté someone is raising to your lips, which, considering the price, it would be a sin not to enjoy.

Beyond the steady rock the steady sea, In movement more immovable than station, Gathers and washes and is gone. It comes, A slow obscure metonymy of motion, Crumbling the inner barriers of the brain. But the crossed rock braces the hills and makes A steady quiet of the steady music, Massive with peace. And listen, now: The foam receding down the sand silvers Between the grains, thin, pure as virgin words, Lending a sheen to Nothing, whispering.

Barque of phosphor On the palmy beach, Move outward into heaven, Into the alabasters And night blues. Foam and cloud are one. Sultry moon-monsters Are dissolving. Fill your black hull With white moonlight. There will never be an end To this droning of the surf.

Here, where precipitate Spring with one light bound Into hot Summer’s lusty arms expires; And where go forth at morn, at eve, at night, Soft airs, that want the lute to play with them, And softer sighs, that know not what they want; Under a wall, beneath an orange-tree Whose tallest flowers could tell the lowlier ones Of sights in Fiesole right up above, While I was gazing a few paces off At what they seemed to show me with their nods, Their frequent whispers and their pointing shoots, A gentle maid came down the garden-steps And gathered the pure treasure in her lap. I heard the branches rustle, and stept forth To drive the ox away, or mule, or goat, (Such I believed it must be); for sweet scents Are the swift vehicles of still sweeter thoughts, And nurse and pillow the dull memory That would let drop without them her best stores. They bring me tales of youth and tones of love, And ’tis and ever was my wish and way To let all flowers live freely, and all die, Whene’er their Genius bids their souls depart, Among their kindred in their native place. I never pluck the rose; the violet’s head Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank And not reproacht me; the ever-sacred cup Of the pure lily hath between my hands Felt safe, unsoil’d, nor lost one grain of gold. I saw the light that made the glossy leaves More glossy; the fair arm, the fairer cheek Warmed by the eye intent on its pursuit; I saw the foot, that, altho half-erect From its grey slipper, could not lift her up To what she wanted: I held down a branch And gather’d her some blossoms, since their hour Was come, and bees had wounded them, and flies Of harder wing were working their way thro And scattering them in fragments under foot. So crisp were some, they rattled unevolved, Others, ere broken off, fell into shells, For such appear the petals when detacht, Unbending, brittle, lucid, white like snow, And like snow not seen thro, by eye or sun: Yet every one her gown received from me Was fairer than the first . . I thought not so, But so she praised them to reward my care. I said: you find the largest. This indeed, Cried she, is large and sweet. She held one forth, Whether for me to look at or to take She knew not, nor did I; but taking it Would best have solved (and this she felt) her doubts. I dared not touch it; for it seemed a part Of her own self; fresh, full, the most mature Of blossoms, yet a blossom; with a touch To fall, and yet unfallen. She drew back The boon she tendered, and then, finding not The ribbon at her waist to fix it in, Dropt it, as loth to drop it, on the rest.

The river is famous to the fish. The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so. The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse. The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek. The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom. The boot is famous to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors. The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it and not at all famous to the one who is pictured. I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiled back. I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

The city and the continent trail off into cold black water the same way: at the western edge, a flat stretch with precipitous planes set perpendicular and back from the beach or beach-equivalent, a blacktop margin where the drugged and dying trudge, queue up for Hades. Bolinas had its junkie lady with gray skin, gray sweater, stumbling through the sand with the short- burst intensity and long-run aimlessness of crackhead hustlers on the West Street piers. Dreams of Bolinas haunted me for years before I saw it. I’d huddle at the foot of the cliff in a cold wind late at night, wrapped in Indian blankets, waiting with strangers as the tidal wave or temblor hit. Tonight I walk with old friends in a new dream past a vest-pocket park of great formality and charm in the far West Village. My disaffected former confidant has grown a pony tail and cruises up the street on a “hog,” a “chopper,” which seems a perfect locomotive choice. I walk out to the quay where gondola after enormous gondola departs for “the other side,” not New Jersey anymore, anymore than something prosaic as another mass of land past the bright horizon could function as a mirror of the chopped-away Bolinas hill. O western edge, where points of interest on maps of individual hearts and bodies disappear in waters of a depth unfathomable even in a dream, I had thought that sleep was meant to blunt your sharpness, not to hone and polish with the lapping of the hungry waves of Lethe.

A telephone line goes cold; birds tread it wherever it goes. A farm back of a great plain tugs an end of the line. I call that farm every year, ringing it, listening, still; no one is home at the farm, the line gives only a hum. Some year I will ring the line on a night at last the right one, and with an eye tapered for braille from the phone on the wall I will see the tenant who waits— the last one left at the place; through the dark my braille eye will lovingly touch his face. “Hello, is Mother at home?” No one is home today. “But Father—he should be there.” No one—no one is here. “But you—are you the one . . . ?” Then the line will be gone because both ends will be home: no space, no birds, no farm. My self will be the plain, wise as winter is gray, pure as cold posts go pacing toward what I know.

I am tired of people combing their hair and dripping in gold. Too much lacking the raw of a natural fondness, and I’m bloated with a craving; pack afewthings. Three times I’ve loved ya. I am tired of wanting you. Of dressing myself. Of putting myself forth at every spoonful of cereal or artificial glory. I am rabid with a consciousness, teeming with an illness coagulated with thought, BUYing your art magazines your red pants your new soles. Porn is free! Did you know that? Porn is free. Untitled, 2014 by Esme Blegvad

At sunrise the deer eat pieces of the quiet, they eat spaces between the quiet & the sounds—; & the numbers on the calendar lie flat in their boxes, they leak through tiny holes in the minutes, evenly so, so evenly, an active sense, before the sense was made… There, now, opposite to set down, the agreed-upon, the shape of the obvious drawn by an earlier enchantment before the new anxiety set in: the workers are safe; the terror stilled for an hour; a lover’s outline, dreamed or imagined, before you read the one-page book again, what was that book, it had no copyright— & what was before? a life, the dazzler, the dark, the singing dust, it turned when you turned, it orpheus-knew what you forgot when you took the bowl of burning time across the room— & if the previous is closer to you now, should you look, doesn’t matter if you do, you carry the some of it with it, out into it— for LG