1630 Nature poems

This is the day the flies fall awake mid-sentence and lie stunned on the windowsill shaking with speeches only it isn’t speech it is trembling sections of puzzlement which break off suddenly as if the questioner had been shot this is one of those wordy days when they drop from their winter quarters in the curtains and sizzle as they fall feeling like old cigarette butts called back to life blown from the surface of some charred world and somehow their wings which are little more than flakes of dead skin have carried them to this blackened disembodied question what dirt shall we visit today? what dirt shall we re-visit? they lift their faces to the past and walk about a bit trying out their broken thought-machines coming back with their used-up words there is such a horrible trapped buzzing wherever we fly it’s going to be impossible to think clearly now until next winter what should we what dirt should we

Just seen, running, and silver-gray along the top tube of a fence between myrtles and me, too slinky for a bird and even at this distance unmistakably a quadruped and nimble, some sort of unspoiled animal, but which? It ran as if away from a threat, peril was everywhere, a footsole crunches it, it is mangled by a tire’s treads, hawk scoops it, turkey buzzard pecks at it, no speech mitigates its pains, even the cat fools with it, until, inedible, it is kicked into the gutter. There she goes, the slinky silver-gray Atalanta of reptiles vanishes in no time, for the wind whisks from her feet such tenuous gusts of air — brisk now where turnpikes stretch their webs, and not forever can an earthiness so sweet as this propel such grace. She’ll have got to the mantis eggs by now, at each gulp of hatchling she slowly blinks with satisfaction.

Harmonious Powers with Nature work On sky, earth, river, lake, and sea: Sunshine and storm, whirlwind and breeze All in one duteous task agree. Once did I see a slip of earth, By throbbing waves long undermined, Loosed from its hold; —how no one knew But all might see it float, obedient to the wind. Might see it, from the mossy shore Dissevered float upon the Lake, Float, with its crest of trees adorned On which the warbling birds their pastime take. Food, shelter, safety there they find There berries ripen, flowerets bloom; There insects live their lives — and die: A peopled world it is; in size a tiny room. And thus through many seasons’ space This little Island may survive But Nature, though we mark her not, Will take away — may cease to give. Perchance when you are wandering forth Upon some vacant sunny day Without an object, hope, or fear, Thither your eyes may turn — the Isle is passed away. Buried beneath the glittering Lake! Its place no longer to be found, Yet the lost fragments shall remain, To fertilize some other ground.

Like eelgrass through a glass- bottom boat on the Silver River, I see the state, obscured yet pure. Derision, a tattooed flame crackling underneath the lewd, uncool khaki of an amused park worker. I was the sometimes boy on a leash, my sliver of assent in 1984 — as if it were my decision. The I-75 signage, more than metaphor. As if I had the right to vote. The slumber parties then were hidden wood; the tea so sweet, the saccharin pink and artificial, like intelligence. The science sponsored in part by chance. I made my acting debut with the red dilettante down the street, “Rusty” Counts, in Rusty Counts Presents: Suburbs of the Dead, straight to VHS. My parents phoned a counselor. A palmetto bug read Megatrends on the fold- ing chair by our above-ground swimming pool ... The pool shark lurked, but not to fear. The end unknowable, blue, inmost, and cold, like the comfort of a diplomatic war.

The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring In the days of long ago, Ranged where the locomotives sing And the prairie flowers lie low:— The tossing, blooming, perfumed grass Is swept away by the wheat, Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by In the spring that still is sweet. But the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring Left us, long ago. They gore no more, they bellow no more, They trundle around the hills no more:— With the Blackfeet, lying low, With the Pawnees, lying low, Lying low.

1 I can support it no longer. Laughing ruefully at myself For all I claim to have suffered I get up. Damned nightmarer! It is New Hampshire out here, It is nearly the dawn. The song of the whippoorwill stops And the dimension of depth seizes everything. 2 The whistles of a peabody bird go overhead Like a needle pushed five times through the air, They enter the leaves, and come out little changed. The air is so still That as they go off through the trees The love songs of birds do not get any fainter. 3 The last memory I have Is of a flower that cannot be touched, Through the bloom of which, all day, Fly crazed, missing bees. 4 As I climb sweat gets up my nostrils, For an instant I think I am at the sea, One summer off Cap Ferrat we watched a black seagull Straining for the dawn, we stood in the surf, Grasshoppers splash up where I step, The mountain laurel crashes at my thighs. 5 There is something joyous in the elegies Of birds. They seem Caught up in a formal delight, Though the mourning dove whistles of despair. But at last in the thousand elegies The dead rise in our hearts, On the brink of our happiness we stop Like someone on a drunk starting to weep. 6 I kneel at a pool, I look through my face At the bacteria I think I see crawling through the moss. My face sees me, The water stirs, the face, Looking preoccupied, Gets knocked from its bones. 7 I weighed eleven pounds At birth, having stayed on Two extra weeks in the womb. Tempted by room and fresh air I came out big as a policeman Blue-faced, with narrow red eyes. It was eight days before the doctor Would scare my mother with me. Turning and craning in the vines I can make out through the leaves The old, shimmering nothingness, the sky. 8 Green, scaly moosewoods ascend, Tenants of the shaken paradise, At every wind last night’s rain Comes splattering from the leaves, It drops in flurries and lies there, The footsteps of some running start. 9 From a rock A waterfall, A single trickle like a strand of wire, Breaks into beads halfway down. I know The birds fly off But the hug of the earth wraps With moss their graves and the giant boulders. 10 In the forest I discover a flower. The invisible life of the thing Goes up in flames that are invisible, Like cellophane burning in the sunlight. It burns up. Its drift is to be nothing. In its covertness it has a way Of uttering itself in place of itself, Its blossoms claim to float in the Empyrean, A wrathful presence on the blur of the ground. The appeal to heaven breaks off. The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness. It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.

From golden showers of the ancient skies, On the first day, and the eternal snow of stars, You once unfastened giant calyxes For the young earth still innocent of scars: Young gladioli with the necks of swans, Laurels divine, of exiled souls the dream, Vermilion as the modesty of dawns Trod by the footsteps of the seraphim; The hyacinth, the myrtle gleaming bright, And, like the flesh of woman, the cruel rose, Hérodiade blooming in the garden light, She that from wild and radiant blood arose! And made the sobbing whiteness of the lily That skims a sea of sighs, and as it wends Through the blue incense of horizons, palely Toward the weeping moon in dreams ascends! Hosanna on the lute and in the censers, Lady, and of our purgatorial groves! Through heavenly evenings let the echoes answer, Sparkling haloes, glances of rapturous love! Mother, who in your strong and righteous bosom, Formed calyxes balancing the future flask, Capacious flowers with the deadly balsam For the weary poet withering on the husk.

Water nymph, you have climbed from the shallows to don your dragon-colors. Perched on a reed stem all night, shedding your skin, you dry your wings in moonlight. Night melts into day. Swift birds wait to snap you up. Fly, dragonfly! Fly!

Where we almost, nay more than married are. —John Donne Pearl egg of fly intimates the curve of larva, its spine and claw point. The cellophane shell, brittle pupa blanket where the almost fly lies like a spring. Coiled and tensile, its exertions will tear the sheet. Six black legs flutter against the dry christening gown, I see his lambent eyes cloistered in these living walls of jet. Small glider, his veined wings are sheer parasols, gauzy skirts that admit the light. The orange down of his pelvis beneath this architecture, blood is the adhesive fastening flight, my sleek aviator presses his sucker feet to my lips. How little he denies me, the drone in my ear and he swarms my heart if one two light steps from the tips of my fingers he bows his head and makes a violin, or hovers behind me when I circle the floor, lonely, he rests on shoulder, elbow, to stare at me with swollen eyes, darkling, drop of ink. A currant in the sugar dish, he models in the painted flowers, black eye of Susan, blunt thorn—he delights in my decadence, the slippery floor, tiles, and stairs haunted with illness: my sensual life and his intersect. He comes on the wing of another spring, in slicks of grey water, the pendant sun. to navigate what is unknown to me, patiently, he regards the chrysalis of skin that envelops the arched veins. Incurious and constant, he is used to waiting for the modest blush, the rustle of disrobing the hush. Of silks unfolding, of gossamer veils drawn as tenderly as breath, from the fluent sea of one blood made of two, the sweetness of his pestilent kiss.

Like bodiless water passing in a sigh, Thro’ palsied streets the fatal shadows flow, And in their sharp disastrous undertow Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky. The towery vista sinks upon the eye, As if it heard the Hebrew bugles blow, Black and dissolved; nor could the founders know How what was built so bright should daily die. Thy mood with man’s is broken and blent in, City of Stains! And ache of thought doth drown The primitive light in which thy life began; Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin, Greater and elder yet the love of man Full in thy look, tho’ the dark visor’s down.