1630 Nature poems

An emerald dungeon’s blacklight glow glimmered in the deeper reaches where my son and I could hear the slub of water riddling through the muck. We’d stumbled on it following a stream, his first cave made stranger still by a chill that closes on the goblined heart of a boy inflamed by stories where gnome-clans hoarded underground bone-shard, mandrake, monkey gland, and eel. And so, grave Hansel paying out his last scraps of bread, he inched inward looking back and gathering himself as he devolved step by step along the wet-ribbed walls, the omphalos seepage of a subterranea that dreamed us into its kingdom come, where like some secret dreams make known the burnt-punk smell of marijuana cluttered up the air, and just beyond, just close enough to see, a spur of light that like a dwindling eyemote disappeared. Then the sound a human soul makes as it slips out from the throat. Composed in darkness, my son’s hand closed on mine. I bent to whisper we could turn back now, but his voice was there before me saying, “Something’s here.” And something was, something that in that instant rose, and moved off from us, or drew up close. In either case, my son came to me almost weightlessly at first, then hungry for what was filling up my arms, the startled, upriding bodyweight of a boy I’d never before felt rock so solidly into the place I was, blind and hunkered in the earthen air. I held him only a moment there. We didn’t speak. And though the wheeze of his breathing must’ve stopped my ears, for weeks to come, settling him back to sleep at night, or waking him from some troubling dream, I’d hear the soft concussion of an outsized heart- beat I could not decide was mine, or his, or the stranger’s I had brought us to. Or if what happened would happen again, years from now, when he is grown, and I have grown newly strange to him.

Well, friend, we’re here again — sauntering the last half-mile to the land’s frayed end to find what’s laid on for us, strewn across the turf — gull feathers, bleached shells, a whole bull seal, bone-dry, knackered from the rut (we knock on his leathern head, but no one’s home). Change, change — that’s what the terns scream down at their seaward rocks; fleet clouds and salt kiss — everything else is provisional, us and all our works. I guess that’s why we like it here: listen — a brief lull, a rock pipit’s seed-small notes.

the relationship between blackbird and fencepost, between the cow and its egret, the field and wildflowers overrunning the field— so little depends upon their trust. Here, in God we trust to keep our cash and thoughts in line— in the sky, an unexplained white line could be the first of many omens. But this is no country for omens, the line as chalky as the moon, bleak and useless as the moon now rising like a breath of cold air . . . There is gullibility in the air.

The smallness of this colloquial cannot muffle the full morning orchestra— amphibious greens clotting the trickle of thaw. The tinny fin flip and eyeflake flash— small schools that give shimmer in the dull skulk of wind. ) (cry one pure perennial I can’t doubt) (something by which to) where we are wearing our belts a little tighter— ) rotted out boat bottom: the boat will stay afloat as long as you pretend to row ) In meadows let alone, gravid stems erupt— hale yellows. ) Gravid stems erupt. The hale yellows pale once they’re plucked.

You can have the grackle whistling blackly from the feeder as it tosses seed, if I can have the red-tailed hawk perched imperious as an eagle on the high branch. You can have the brown shed, the field mice hiding under the mower, the wasp’s nest on the door, if I can have the house of the dead oak, its hollowed center and feather-lined cave. You can have the deck at midnight, the possum vacuuming the yard in its white prowl, if I can have the yard of wild dreaming, pesky raccoons, and the roaming, occasional bear. You can have the whole house, window to window, roof to soffits to hardwood floors, if I can have the screened porch at dawn, the Milky Way, any comets in our yard.

Lash everything irredeemable to the ficus with muscle. Use the flexor digitorum brevis from the arch of my right foot. This is how what’s grounded gets hitched to the rooted, everything cramped into place and contemplative. Tight striations might as well be bindings to Bodhi as body. Why not dump this tired mind at the foot of a tree, aerial roots less caustic than an unanswered calling — or perhaps this is it, to sit, to ponder, to ask: what violated cunt, what unhappy gasp, what sad spat, and toppling building left us blooming untoward? Who puts flowers on the inside of a fig except the injured or the bereft? The ones who hankered hard and failed to do anything but live lush and fallible? What regret is: bark or bitch. The world succumbs to beauty even now, in the throes. The sky is dark and hidden behind branches, cephalic veins clotted with grief. Hush now, finally. All the face can do is flush, sympathetic nervous system, visible horror of wounded and wounding. All inflorescence remains safe inside that place the mind opens up pear-shaped and vast: the body of every lover is unattached to hurt or hope, falls in its own field of daffodils, to curl fetal with singular prowess or glut.

Our loons still scull on the pewter calm of the lake, the chick having dodged the eagle one more day. The valorous drake and hen both held it between their bodies while the raptor circled. Reprieve. And here I am, old. I stooped an hour ago to dump the pail of dace I'd trapped, then watched them scatter, the ones we hadn't hooked through their dorsals for bait. Twenty or so now swim at large— still prey, but not to us, Who are headed home in the morning. I’m poised to throw away this clutch of wilting black-eyed Susans picked wild by my wife of all these years to grace our painted metal table, where we lifted ladders of spine from fat white perch, last supper. So here I am, this aging man who wants somehow to write only one love song after another. I pause at dusk, I blink, I toss Our dim bouquet into late summer’s woods.

The woods are the book we read over and over as children. Now trees lie at angles, felled by lightning, torn by tornados, silvered trunks turning back to earth. Late November light slants through the oaks as our small parade, father, mother, child, shushes along, the wind searching treetops for the last leaf. Childhood lies on the forest floor, not evergreen but oaken, its branches latched to a graying sky. Here is the scarf we left years ago like a bookmark, meaning to return the next day, having just turned our heads toward a noise in the bushes, toward the dinnerbell in the distance, toward what we knew and did not know we knew, in the spreading twilight that returns changed to a changed place.

more the idea of the flame than the flame, as in: the flame of the rose petal, the flame of the thorn the sun is a flame, the dog’s teeth flames ~ to be clear: with the body, captain, we can do as we wish, we can do as we wish with the body but we cannot leave marks—capt’n I’m trying to get this right ~ the world’s so small, the sky’s so high we pray for rain it rains, we pray for sun it suns we pray on our knees, we move our lips we pray in our minds, we clasp our hands our hands look tied before us ~ I remember, capt’n, something, it didn’t happen, not to me—this guy, I knew him by face, I don’t remember his name, one night he’s walking home from a party, a car it clipped him, for hours he wandered, dazed, his family, his neighbors, with flashlights they searched, all night, the woods, calling out his name ~ here’s the part, capt’n, where I try to tell a story as if it were a confession: once, in elementary school, I was hiding out on damon rock, lighting matches & letting them drop to the leaves below—little flare- ups, flash fires—a girl wandered down the path, she just stood there, watching the matches fall from my hand— ~ capt’n, I’m trying to be precise: hot day, a cage in the sun, a room without air, the mind-bending heat, the music a flame—hey metallica hey britanny hey airless hey fuse, I don’t know how it happened, I was perched far above, I offered her a match to pull down her pants—one match, her hairless body, hey little girl, I dropped it unlit. I didn’t know what it was I was looking at. ~ hey capt’n I don’t know if I’m allowed hey capt’n years ago I’m walking down a road one drunk night, even now I wonder—sometimes still I imagine—was I hit by a bus, am I stumbling am I dazed, this dream this confession, hey little girl is yr daddy home, hey capt’n hey sir am I making any sense? ~ the boy stood on the burning deck, stammering elocution, wait— the boy stood in the burning cage, stammering electrocution, no—the boy stood in the hot-hot room stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering everything you say I did I did. ~ hey metallica hey britanny hey airless hey fuse hey phonograph hey hades hey thoughtless hey ~ capt’n this room is on fire capt’n, this body will not stop burning capt’n oh my captain this burning has become a body capt’n oh my captain this child is ash capt’n oh my captain my hands pass right through her capt’n oh my captain I don’t know what it is I’m looking at ~ it’s important to be precise, to say what I know— the sun is fire, the center of the earth is fire, yr mother’s cunt is fire, an airless flame, still, still, I don’t know why she pushed me out, this cold-cold furnace, we all were pushed, a rim of light around our heads, she gave a kick, sent us crawling out, toward the flame, toward the pit, the flaming pit, yr lover’s cunt, the flame her tongue, the flame a thorn ~ everyday, capt’n, sir, captain, I was left, a child, after school, I was alone, I found a match, under the sink I found a can, a spray can,ly-sol dis-infectant, it made a torch, I was careful the flame didn’t enter the can, I knew it would explode, somehow I knew, I’m trying to be clear sir—the flame shot across the room, then it was gone

There are trees and they are on fire. There are hummingbirds and they are on fire. There are graves and they are on fire and the things coming out of the graves are on fire. The house you grew up in is on fire. There is a gigantic trebuchet on fire on the edge of a crater and the crater is on fire. There is a complex system of tunnels deep underneath the surface with only one entrance and one exit and the entire system is filled with fire. There is a wooden cage we’re trapped in, too large to see, and it is on fire. There are jaguars on fire. Wolves. Spiders. Wolf-spiders on fire. If there were people. If our fathers were alive. If we had a daughter. Fire to the edges. Fire in the river beds. Fire between the mattresses of the bed you were born in. Fire in your mother’s belly. There is a little boy wearing a fire shirt holding a baby lamb. There is a little girl in a fire skirt asking if she can ride the baby lamb like a horse. There is you on top of me with thighs of fire while a hot red fog hovers in your hair. There is me on top of you wearing a fire shirt and then pulling the fire shirt over my head and tossing it like a fireball through the fog at a new kind of dinosaur. There are meteorites disintegrating in the atmosphere just a few thousand feet above us and tiny fireballs are falling down around us, pooling around us, forming a kind of fire lake which then forms a kind of fire cloud. There is this feeling I get when I am with you. There is our future house burning like a star on the hill. There is our dark flickering shadow. There is my hand on fire in your hand on fire, my body on fire above your body on fire, our tongues made of ash. We are rocks on a distant and uninhabitable planet. We have our whole life ahead of us.