1630 Nature poems

A roadside inn. Lakeside dive. Spiffed up. End of a summer day. And I suppose I should be smiling beneficently at the families playing near the shore, their plastic balls and splashes and chatter. But my eye pivots left to a couple; he is carrying her into the water. He's strong enough, and she is light enough to be carried. I see how she holds her own, hugging his neck, his chest steady as his arms. I have never seen such a careful dunk, half-dunk, as he gives her. That beautiful play he makes lifting her from the water. And I suppose I should be admiring the sunset, all purple and orange and rose now. Nice porch here, too. Yeah, great view. But I have never seen such a loving carrying as he gives her. Imagine being so light as to float above water in love.

The two of them stood in the middle water, The current slipping away, quick and cold, The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold, Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter. Maybe he regretted he had brought her— She'd rather have been elsewhere, her look told— Perhaps a year ago, but now too old. Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her: To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails And fishes shelter in the undergrowth. And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth, Life and death weighed in the shining scales, The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.

We sit on the spillway, the red and white bobbers lilted by the wind, while some force beneath the water brings everything to attention, the tight line, the echoed rings conjuring tension inside us. And when I touch the rod, a living strangeness, a quivering unseen tugs at my imagination, not receiving but sending some impulse down the line, into the muddy water, and when the sunfish erupts I've made the spangles of water the verdant scales, the shudder of tail fin and light. We build fish all afternoon, threading hooks, looping line into a tight noose, running gills down the stringer into an opalescent chain of glimmering emerald bodies. Soon our mothers will call with their icy vodka voices and we will carry them home like the weight of guilt, but for now night closes around us.

With adams, caddis, tricos, light cahills, blue-wing olives, royal coachmen, chartreuse trudes, green drakes, blue duns, black gnats, Nancy quills, Joe’s hoppers, yellow humpies, purple chutes, prince nymphs, pheasant tails, Eileen’s hare’s ears, telicos, flashbacks, Jennifer’s muddlers, Frank bugs, sow bugs, zug bugs, autumn splendors, woolly worms, black buggers, Kay’s gold zuddlers, clippers, tippet, floatant, spools of leader, tin shot, lead shot, hemostats, needle nose, rod, reel, vest, net, boots, cap, shades and waders, gortex shell and one bent Macanudo— I wade in a swirl of May-colored water, cast a fine gray quill, the last tie of my father.

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna or on any river for that matter to be perfectly honest. Not in July or any month have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure— of fishing on the Susquehanna. I am more likely to be found in a quiet room like this one— a painting of a woman on the wall, a bowl of tangerines on the table— trying to manufacture the sensation of fishing on the Susquehanna. There is little doubt that others have been fishing on the Susquehanna, rowing upstream in a wooden boat, sliding the oars under the water then raising them to drip in the light. But the nearest I have ever come to fishing on the Susquehanna was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia when I balanced a little egg of time in front of a painting in which that river curled around a bend under a blue cloud-ruffled sky, dense trees along the banks, and a fellow with a red bandanna sitting in a small, green flat-bottom boat holding the thin whip of a pole. That is something I am unlikely ever to do, I remember saying to myself and the person next to me. Then I blinked and moved on to other American scenes of haystacks, water whitening over rocks, even one of a brown hare who seemed so wired with alertness I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

The fitful alternations of the rain, When the chill wind, languid as with pain Of its own heavy moisture, here and there Drives through the gray and beamless atmosphere.

One Green moves through the tops of trees and grows lighter greens as it recedes, each of which includes a grey, and among the greys, or beyond them, waning finely into white, there is one white spot, absolute; it could be an egret or perhaps a crane at the edge of the water where it meets a strip of sand. Two There is a single, almost dazzling white spot of a white house out loud against the fields, and the forest in lines receding, rises, and then planes. Color, in pieces or entire; its presence veneers over want; in all its moving parts, it could be something else half-hidden by trees. Conservatory, gloriette, gazebo, or bandshell, a door ajar on the top floor. Three The trees are half air. They fissure the sky; you could count the leaves, pare time defined as that which, no matter how barely, exceeds what the eye could grasp in a glance; intricate woods opening out before a body of water edged with a swatch of meadow where someone has hung a bright white sheet out in the sun to dry. Four A white bird in a green forest is a danger to itself. Stands out. Shines. Builds up inside. Like it’s dangerous to cry while driving or to talk to strangers or to stare at the sun and a thousand other things we’ve always heard people who wear white see better at night, though they gradually lose this trait as they age. Five The air across the valley is slightly hazy though thinning though patches remain between the groves of trees that edge a clearing in which stands a single house. A child in a white t-shirt has just walked out of the house and is turning to walk down to the lake.

the breath               the trees               the bridge the road                  the rain                the sheen the breath               the line                  the skin the vineyard            the fences             the leg the water                the breath             the shift the hair                  the wheels             the shoulder the breath               the lane                the streak the lining                the hour                the reasons the name                the distance          the breath the scent                the dogs                the blear the lungs                the breath             the glove the signal               the turn                  the need the steps                the lights               the door the mouth               the tongue             the eyes the burn                  the burned            the burning

Wherever the flamingo goes, she brings a city’s worth of furbelows. She seems unnatural by nature— too vivid and peculiar a structure to be pretty, and flexible to the point of oddity. Perched on those legs, anything she does seems like an act. Descending on her egg or draping her head along her back, she’s too exact and sinuous to convince an audience she’s serious. The natural elect, they think, would be less pink, less able to relax their necks, less flamboyant in general. They privately expect that it’s some poorly jointed bland grey animal with mitts for hands whom God protects.

The eagle floats and glides, circling the burnished aspen, then takes the high pines with a flash of underwing. As surely as the eagle sails toward the bay’s open curve, as surely as he swoops and seizes the struggling fish, pulling it from an osprey’s beak; so too, autumn descends, to steal the glistening summer from our open hands.