1630 Nature poems

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.

I'm herdsman of a flock. The sheep are my thoughts And my thoughts are all sensations. I think with my eyes and my ears And my hands and feet And nostrils and mouth. To think a flower is to see and smell it. To eat a fruit is to sense its savor. And that is why, when I feel sad, In a day of heat, because of so much joy And lay me down in the grass to rest And close my sun-warmed eyes, I feel my whole body relaxed in reality And know the whole truth and am happy.

First there was some other order of things never spoken but in dreams of darkest creation. Then there was black earth, lake, the face of light on water. Then the thick forest all around that light, and then the human clay whose blood we still carry rose up in us who remember caves with red bison painted in their own blood, after their kind. A wildness swam inside our mothers, desire through closed eyes, a new child wearing the red, wet mask of birth, delivered into this land already wounded, stolen and burned beyond reckoning. Red is this yielding land turned inside out by a country of hunters with iron, flint and fire. Red is the fear that turns a knife back against men, holds it at their throats, and they cannot see the claw on the handle, the animal hand that haunts them from some place inside their blood. So that is hunting, birth, and one kind of death. Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds. Red was the infinite fruit of stolen bodies. The doctors wanted to know what invented disease how wounds healed from inside themselves how life stands up in skin, if not by magic. They divined the red shadows of leeches that swam in white bowls of water: they believed stars in the cup of sky. They cut the wall of skin to let what was bad escape but they were reading the story of fire gone out and that was a science. As for the animal hand on death’s knife, knives have as many sides as the red father of war who signs his name in the blood of other men. And red was the soldier who crawled through a ditch of human blood in order to live. It was the canal of his deliverance. It is his son who lives near me. Red is the thunder in our ears when we meet. Love, like creation, is some other order of things. Red is the share of fire I have stolen from root, hoof, fallen fruit. And this was hunger. Red is the human house I come back to at night swimming inside the cave of skin that remembers bison. In that round nation of blood we are all burning, red, inseparable fires the living have crawled and climbed through in order to live so nothing will be left for death at the end. This life in the fire, I love it. I want it, this life.

Everyone has a cousin Benjamin Bunny. Peter said a walk would do him good. The edge of the wood. Peter did not enjoy himself anymore. He never would again. The brooding lettuces in their falcon hoods. The coppice gate wound shut by weeds, the jaws of life trying to keep it closed tight but anyone can climb it. As a child I played on a gate in a neighborhood park that swung of itself and sounded like the distress call of a rabbit. I stood on the bottom slat and backed in and out of the air. I’ll never get out of here. The gate was pure folly, without fencing on either side, Greek tragedy staged around a doorway the imagination strains to enter. I was raised in an aisle seat with an eye line of an actor about to come through from behind it. Melodramatic onions grew wild. I cried and cried until someone said it’s okay to cry, it means the onions are fresh. Every dream begins with a threshold. Meat in the driveway where dogs tipped the garbage. Where’s your mouth? There is a whistle you can buy that makes the sound of a rabbit screaming hunters use to call whatever they want out of the thicket because everything they want wants rabbit for dinner. Move your hand along the shaft to change the call from jack to cotton- tail and back again. Once you see them nose out of the interior at your bidding what stops you from sounding every single day? All day? The shrill imagined rabbit’s canned terror. You can do it with a reed of grass. Cup your hands. Everything alive is listening. I knew a hunter who could do a spot-on fawn whose suffering would bring a doe into the open every time. He didn’t want a doe, though. He wanted a buck. Here’s what I can’t stand to acknowledge: when bucks hear the sound of the fawn my friend makes with his mouth they come, too, not in pity, but in lust, so badly they want the doe drawn by the yearning of a fawn in need of her. Everything is within range suddenly, and who am I to judge. He mounts her relief and spring comes. No. He takes a bullet. I was caught up in theatrics and forgot whose theater this is.