1630 Nature poems

1 Is that an attitude for a flower, to stand like a club at the walk; poor slain boy, is that a way to show gratitude to the gods? White with colored hearts, the tall flowers sway around you, all the other boys, in the cold spring, as the violets open. 2 There were no flowers in antiquity but boys’ bodies, pale, perfectly imagined. So the gods sank to human shape with longing. In the field, in the willow grove, Apollo sent the courtiers away. 3 And from the blood of the wound a flower sprang, lilylike, more brilliant than the purples of Tyre. Then the god wept: his vital grief flooded the earth. 4 Beauty dies: that is the source of creation. Outside the ring of trees the courtiers could hear the dove’s call transmit its uniform, its inborn sorrow— They stood listening, among the rustling willows. Was this the god’s lament? They listened carefully. And for a short time all sound was sad. 5 There is no other immortality: in the cold spring, the purple violets open. And yet, the heart is black, there is its violence frankly exposed. Or is it not the heart at the center but some other word? And now someone is bending over them, meaning to gather them— 6 They could not wait in exile forever. Through the glittering grove the courtiers ran calling the name of their companion over the birds’ noise, over the willows’ aimless sadness. Well into the night they wept, their clear tears altering no earthly color.

You could hike over it, the you without a problem, its mountain viewed from the closet coats are found in, your constant Yes/No a hee-haw, a mule alert that’s pasture-perfect, a coronary at the last corner. Nobody’s framing you for the chintz- covered wall to cover the leak. Besides, you like leaks, you’re inside the view as if hibernating or crazy, you try not to erupt. Hypothesize the rest, the languor and freshet, the crags, the serrated parade. So — heights? What about the hairy stream, the pushed-up bushes saying Pet me? You got a problem with that? Cascade is what you call it a voice off the hanger, the blouse cast in a corner or animate.

The brook is this mix of roar & hiss as if God has managed to scalpel a section of tempest & clothespin it in the woods Over There Always draped in the trees while we eat white summer peaches from celadon bowls while the sun bleaches & blue jay squawks score the maple, oak birch and apple-treed sky with their oblique Scriabin musics. Fifteen years since I have seen a real Fall her deciduous burlesque, her glistering things sifting on the old cider mill. A holy show. I hold a wooden fragrance & a sodden mush of crushed flowing apples in a cache and will never give it up. The cardinal is the best bird because it is a red mark on the blank snow amid the charcoal Twombly of maple, oak birch and apple branches. Pines are green & faraway, don’t figure. My sister in spring is even prettier, her smile the genuine quality of it undiminished in the many months since I have been in Happy Valley. It roars and is constantly in spate because it has its reasons spring being spring plus my visiting.

Wind from the northwestern quarter is lifting him high above the dove-gray, crimson, umber, brown Connecticut Valley. Far beneath, chickens daintily pause and move unseen in the yard of the tumbledown farmstead, chipmunks blend with the heath. Now adrift on the airflow, unfurled, alone, all that he glimpses—the hills’ lofty, ragged ridges, the silver stream that threads quivering like a living bone of steel, badly notched with rapids, the townships like strings of beads strewn across New England. Having slid down to nil thermometers—those household gods in niches— freeze, inhibiting thus the fire of leaves and churches’ spires. Still, no churches for him. In the windy reaches, undreamt of by the most righteous choir, he soars in a cobalt-blue ocean, his beak clamped shut, his talons clutched tight into his belly —claws balled up like a sunken fist— sensing in each wisp of down the thrust from below, glinting back the berry of his eyeball, heading south-southeast to the Rio Grande, the Delta, the beech groves and farther still: to a nest hidden in the mighty groundswell of grass whose edges no fingers trust, sunk amid forest’s odors, filled with splinters of red-speckled eggshell, with a brother or a sister’s ghost. The heart overgrown with flesh, down, feather, wing, pulsing at feverish rate, nonstopping, propelled by internal heat and sense, the bird goes slashing and scissoring the autumnal blue, yet by the same swift token, enlarging it at the expense of its brownish speck, barely registering on the eye, a dot, sliding far above the lofty pine tree; at the expense of the empty look of that child, arching up at the sky, that couple that left the car and lifted their heads, that woman on the stoop. But the uprush of air is still lifting him higher and higher. His belly feathers feel the nibbling cold. Casting a downward gaze, he sees the horizon growing dim, he sees, as it were, the features of the first thirteen colonies whose chimneys all puff out smoke. Yet it’s their total within his sight that tells the bird of his elevation, of what altitude he’s reached this trip. What am I doing at such a height? He senses a mixture of trepidation and pride. Heeling over a tip of wing, he plummets down. But the resilient air bounces him back, winging up to glory, to the colorless icy plane. His yellow pupil darts a sudden glare of rage, that is, a mix of fury and terror. So once again he turns and plunges down. But as walls return rubber balls, as sins send a sinner to faith, or near, he’s driven upward this time as well! He! whose innards are still so warm! Still higher! Into some blasted ionosphere! That astronomically objective hell of birds that lacks oxygen, and where the milling stars play millet served from a plate or a crescent. What, for the bipeds, has always meant height, for the feathered is the reverse. Not with his puny brain but with shriveled air sacs he guesses the truth of it: it’s the end. And at this point he screams. From the hooklike beak there tears free of him and flies ad luminem the sound Erinyes make to rend souls: a mechanical, intolerable shriek, the shriek of steel that devours aluminum; “mechanical,” for it’s meant for nobody, for no living ears: not man’s, not yelping foxes’, not squirrels’ hurrying to the ground from branches; not for tiny field mice whose tears can’t be avenged this way, which forces them into their burrows. And only hounds lift up their muzzles. A piercing, high-pitched squeal, more nightmarish than the D-sharp grinding of the diamond cutting glass, slashes the whole sky across. And the world seems to reel for an instant, shuddering from this rending. For the warmth burns space in the highest as badly as some iron fence down here brands incautious gloveless fingers. We, standing where we are, exclaim “There!” and see far above the tear that is a hawk, and hear the sound that lingers in wavelets, a spider skein swelling notes in ripples across the blue vault of space whose lack of echo spells, especially in October, an apotheosis of pure sound. And caught in this heavenly patterned lace, starlike, spangled with hoarfrost powder, silver-clad, crystal-bound, the bird sails to the zenith, to the dark-blue high of azure. Through binoculars we foretoken him, a glittering dot, a pearl. We hear something ring out in the sky, like some family crockery being broken, slowly falling aswirl, yet its shards, as they reach our palms, don’t hurt but melt when handled. And in a twinkling once more one makes out curls, eyelets, strings, rainbowlike, multicolored, blurred commas, ellipses, spirals, linking heads of barley, concentric rings— the bright doodling pattern the feather once possessed, a map, now a mere heap of flying pale flakes that make a green slope appear white. And the children, laughing and brightly dressed, swarm out of doors to catch them, crying with a loud shout in English, “Winter's here!”

Where I lived once, a roller coaster's range of timber hills peaked just by our backyard cliff and cats undulated scream-driven round its seismograph— and climbed up to us with an indrawn gasp of girls. Smiles and yelling could be exchanged as they crested then they'd pitch over, straining back in a shriek that volleyed as the cars were snatched from sight in the abyss, and were soon back. Weekdays they rested, and I rested all days. There was a spider in my head I'd long stay unaware of. If you're raped you mostly know but I'd been cursed, and refused to notice or believe it. Aloof in a Push squat, I thought I was moral, or dead. Misrule was strict there, and the Pill of the day only ever went into one mouth, not mine, and foamed a Santa-beard. I was resented for chastity, and slept on an overcoat. Once Carol from upstairs came to me in bra and kindness and the spider secreted by girls' derision-rites to spare women from me had to numb me to a crazed politeness. Squeals rode the edge of the thrill building. Cartoonist Mercier drew springs under Sydney. Push lovers were untrue on principle. It's all architecture over there now. A new roller coaster flies its ups and downs in wealth's face like an affront. I've written a new body that only needs a reader's touch. If love is cursed in us, then when God exists, we don't.

The unsympathetic wind, how she has evaded me for years now, leaving a guileless shell and no way to navigate. Once when I stood on a plateau of earth just at the moment before the dangerous, jutting peaks converged upon the lilting sway of grasslands, I almost found a way back. There, the sky, quite possibly all the elements, caused the rock and soil and vegetation to congregate. Their prayer was not new and so faint I could hardly discern. Simple remembrances, like a tiny, syncopated chorus calling everyone home: across a thousand eastward miles, and what little wind was left at my back. But I could not move. And then the music was gone. All that was left were the spring time faces of mountains, gazing down, their last patches of snow, luminous. I dreamed of becoming snow melt, gliding down the slope and in to the valley. With the promise, an assurance, that there is always a way to become bird, tree, water again.

made it to Florida and then I went for a walk. The frog pond is half-iced over. I chucked a stick at it— still thin. On the white side, the wind twirled a leaf around like a prepubescent figure skater who’s given up her childhood to get here. Of course, the leaf was wearing its practice costume of browns, the whole world offed of spangles as I am offed of you. Why mail snow? Just to show I could keep it cold in so much heat.

The grasses in the field have toppled, and in places it seems that a large, now absent, animal must have passed the night. The hay will right itself if the day turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully. None of your blustering entrances or exits, doors swinging wildly on their hinges, or your huge unconscious sighs when you read something sad, like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan, where he traveled after Clover died. Everything blooming bows down in the rain: white irises, red peonies; and the poppies with their black and secret centers lie shattered on the lawn.

The helicopter, a sort of controlled silver leaf dropped lightly into the clearing. The searchlights swung, the little girl, the little girl was crying, her mother, a girl herself, was giving birth, the forest dropped birdseeds of milk. Then the helicopter lifted away, the mother rested. Like him who came to us empty-handed, who came, it seemed, with nothing, Joseph Cornell—          making a shoebox universe to put it all in.

The sound of a guitar drifts through the air. Cupped in my hand, a snowflake quivers lightly. Thick patches of fog draw back to reveal A mountain range, rolling like a melody. I have gathered the inheritance of the four seasons. There is no sign of man in the valley. Picked wild flowers continue to grow, Their flowering is their time of death. Along the path in the primordial wood Green sunlight flows through the slits. A russet hawk interprets into bird cries The mountain's tale of terror. Abruptly I cry out, "Hello, Bai—hua—Mountain." "Hello, my—child," comes the echo From a distant waterfall. It was a wind within a wind, drawing A restless response from the land, I whispered, and the snowflake Drifted from my hand down the abyss.