1630 Nature poems

All the angels of Tie Siding were on fire. The famous sky was gone. Presumably the mountains were still there, invisible in haze. OK, there was only one angel, but she was a torch in the wind, beside the wind-ripped American flag the post office flies. OK, she wasn't literally on fire. Maybe her angelic red hair made me think she was ablaze as it flaunted the prairie and made a festival of itself. There was a fireworks stand nearby, entirely beside the point, as was the Fourth of July. It was really dry. It was fire season. It was the wind festival, featuring an angel standing in it, letting her red hair conflagrate history, reduce it to ash, bid it start anew, erase the sky with atrocity's own smoke. She wore, besides her flame of hair, blue jeans and a singlet. She was violent in the wind. I started walking toward her. I'm still walking toward her, no idea what to say when I get there.

In the dry summer field at nightfall, fireflies rise like sparks. Imagine the presence of ghosts flickering, the ghosts of young friends, your father nearest in the distance. This time they carry no sorrow, no remorse, their presence is so light. Childhood comes to you, memories of your street in lamplight, holding those last moments before bed, capturing lightning-bugs, with a blossom of the hand letting them go. Lightness returns, an airy motion over the ground you remember from Ring Around the Rosie. If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies again, not part of your stories, as unaware of you as sleep, being beautiful and quiet all around you.

The lights come on and stay on under the trees. Visibly a whole neighborhood inhabits the dusk, so punctual and in place it seems to deny dark its dominion. Nothing will go astray, the porch lamps promise. Sudden, as though a match failed to ignite at the foot of the garden, the first squibs trouble the eye. Impossible not to share that sportive, abortive, clumsy, where-are-we-now dalliance with night, such soothing relentlessness. What should we make of fireflies, their quick flare of promise and disappointment, their throwaway style? Our heads turn this way and that. We are loath to miss such jauntiness in nature. Those fugitive selves, winged and at random! Our flickery might-have-beens come up form the woods to haunt us! Our yet-to-be as tentative frolic! What do fireflies say? That loneliness made of light becomes at last convivial singleness? That any antic spark cruising the void might titillate creation? And whether they spend themselves, or go to ground, or drift with their lights out, they have left the gloom, for as long as our eyes take to absorb such absence, less than it seemed, as childless and deprived as Chaos and Old Night. But ruffled, too, as though it unearthed some memory of light from its long blackout, a hospitable core fit home for fireflies, brushed by fireflies' wings.

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies, And here on earth come emulating flies, That though they never equal stars in size, (And they were never really stars at heart) Achieve at times a very star-like start. Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

It's almost May and yesterday I saw a firefly. You don't see them a lot in the city. Sometimes in the park in the near dark one comes out you'll hear a little kid shout Lightning bug! Firefly! It's almost May and yesterday I caught a firefly in my hand. First firefly I seen in a long, long time. Make a wish, Miss Edna said. Make a good one. Firefly wishes always come true.

in memory of amy clampitt A single seedling, camp follower of arson...

Stripped in a flamedance, the bluff backing our houses quivered in wet-black skin. A shawl of haze tugged tight around the starkness. We could have choked on August. Smoke thick in our throats, nearly naked as the earth, we played bare feet over the heat caught in asphalt. Could we, green girls, have prepared for this? Yesterday, we played in sand-carpeted caves. The store we built sold broken bits of ice plant, empty snail shells, leaves. Our school’s walls were open sky. We reeled in wonder from the hills, oblivious to the beckoning crescendo and to our parent’s hushed communion. When our bluff swayed into the undulation, we ran into the still streets of our suburb, feet burning against a fury that we did not know was change.

Up from wood rot, wrinkling up from duff and homely damps, spore-born and cauled like a meager seer, it pushes aside earth to make a small place from decay. Bashful, it brings honeycombed news from below of the coming plenty and everything rising.

What I notice first within this rough scene fixed in memory is the rare quality of its lightning, as if those bolts were clipped from a comic book, pasted on low cloud, or fashioned with cardboard, daubed with gilt then hung overhead on wire and fine hooks. What I hear most clearly within that thunder now is its grief—a moan, a long lament echoing, an ache. And the rain? Raucous enough, pounding, but oddly musical, and, well, eager to entertain, solicitous. No storm since has been framed with such matter-of-fact artifice, nor to such comic effect. No, the thousand-plus storms since then have turned increasingly artless, arbitrary, bearing—every one of them—a numbing burst. And today, from the west a gust and a filling pressure pulsing in the throat—offering little or nothing to make light of.

Look at them flit Lickety-split Wiggling Swiggling Swerving Curving Hurrying Scurrying Chasing Racing Whizzing Whisking Flying Frisking Tearing around With a leap and a bound But none of them making the tiniest tiniest tiniest tiniest tiniest sound