1630 Nature poems

The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

The loneliest days, damp and indistinct, sea and land a haze. And purple fog horns blossomed over tides— bruises being born in silence, so slow, so out there, around, above and below. In such hurts of sound the known world became neither flat nor round. The steaming tea pot was all we fathomed of is and is not. The hours were hallways with doors at the ends opened into days fading into night and the scattering particles of light. Nothing was done then. Nothing was ever done. Then it was done.

Surrounded by bone, surrounded by cells, by rings, by rings of hell, by hair, surrounded by air-is-a-thing, surrounded by silhouette, by honey-wet bees, yet by skeletons of trees, surrounded by actual, yes, for practical purposes, people, surrounded by surreal popcorn, surrounded by the reborn: Surrender in the center to surroundings. O surrender forever, never end her, let her blend around, surrender to the surroundings that surround the tender endo-surrender, that tumble through the tumbling to that blue that curls around the crumbling, to that, the blue that rumbles under the sun bounding the pearl that we walk on, talk on; we can chalk that up to experience, sensing the brown here that’s blue now, a drop of water surrounding a cow that’s black & white, the warbling Blackburnian twitter that’s machining midnight orange in the light that’s glittering in the light green visible wind. That’s the ticket to the tunnel through the thicket that’s a cricket’s funnel of music to correct & pick it out from under the wing that whirls up over & out.

No daylight for two months, an ice chisel slivers frozen lake water refracting blue cinders. By light of an oil lamp, a child learns to savor marrow: cracked caribou bones a heap on the floor. A sinew, thickly wrapped in soot, threads through the meat on her chin: a tattoo in three slender lines. One white ptarmigan plume fastened to the lip of a birch wood basket; thaw approaches: the plume turns brown. On the edge of the open lead, a toggle-head harpoon waits to launch: bowhead sings to krill. Thickened pack ice cracking; a baleen fishing line pulls taut a silver dorsal fin of a round white fish. A slate-blade knife slices along the grain of a caribou hindquarter; the ice cellar lined in willow branches is empty. Saltwater suffuses into a flint quarry, offshore a thin layer of radiation glazes leathered walrus skin. Alongside shatters of a hummock, a marsh marigold flattens under three black toes of a sandhill crane. A translucent sheep horn dipper skims a freshwater stream; underneath, arctic char lay eggs of mercury. Picked before the fall migration, cloudberries drench in whale oil, ferment in a sealskin poke. A tundra swan nests inside a rusted steel rum; she abandons her newborns hatched a deep crimson.

GUITH a greylag morning, the sea a conscious blue. CALF SOUND orca in a sea blue room, breathing pearls that rise to the surface. GROATHA the plenum of the shed: every part infilled with flutter, glass, sheep turd, gusts of damp. GREENTOFT gunshot punctures a field of geese, their clackety rise a flock of helicopters. THE SETTER STONE an old man steps out of the ground all lines and angles, sun snagged in his beard. MILLCROFT a tree softened house: red willow, alder, pine, eucalyptus rooting. WARNESS a stream hole a pure, dense fall; one ocean falling into another. PLANTATION wren, silver lark, crow woody snipe, curlew, hen hawk day owl, starling. SOUTH END the Varagen, beaded with spotlights curves through the dark round great holes in the sea WARD HILL climbing with the moon, the wind blowing round my mouth— a low note, like an owl.

I’ the how-dumb-deid o’ the cauld hairst nicht The warl’ like an eemis stane Wags i’ the lift; An’ my eerie memories fa’ Like a yowdendrift. Like a yowdendrift so’s I couldna read The words cut oot i’ the stane Had the fug o’ fame An’ history’s hazelraw No’ yirdit thaim.

We are in the position of defining myth by the shape of its absence. -Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers The bluebird's cold mistimed egg fetched up from the one-legged box after the pair had left for points south & unknown (never, as it turned out, to return) I renested in the half-geode by the windowsill where it gleamed &, months becoming years, seemed about to last forever, grow more consistent with itself, holding its pure blue firmament up over what by now was nothing, till one January day, snow melting to a fast flood, I blew it softly onto my palm so I could hold its cerulean up against new sky, home against home, where it lay weightless & delicate as the Xmas ornament we'd just put away, but when I went to roll it gently back onto its bed, & leave it there, I saw a thread, a crack, another, watched it sink in slowly on itself, shard on shard collapsing from my touch & breath, relaxing into the shape of its absence

There is no radical shift of light or redwings calling areas of marsh their territories yet, nor plovers probing for copepods. Only a yellow front-end loader laying out a new berm on the beach, from tubes too heavy to be called hoses, its audience one man and his protesting dog. No frosted wedding cake on tour, no Cap’n Beauregard hailing us from the Texas deck, no Texas deck, just an unshaven crew launching zodiacs from the county dredge, its twin stacks staining itself and the air with smoke, as battered an emblem of hope as any other. So spring comes to Egg Island, squealing and unwilling. Sulfur and diesel, flywheel, gear and grind until one morning the equinox dawns and silences the whole shebang.

By the time we got out on the water the sun was so low, it wasn’t like water but a field of gray snow that we plowed in one endless white furrow of water as I skirted the rocks and wrecked trawlers and abandoned old jetties just under the water, while you moaned in the bow, slick with fever, whispering back to whatever the water chattered and hissed through the hull— until at last there were lights on the water and I let the old Mercury rattle and sputter its steaming gray rainbows out onto the water as we drifted, at idle, for the last time in your life, through that beloved, indifferent harbor.

— Way on back through the underwood by Bowen’s Canal Well we’d heard it to be veiny with cottonmouths I’m not gonna lie. • For true the sheer (snake-electric) back-beyond of the place put a pull on us like a magnet. • That that rag-rope (flagged and) barred the path just egged us on. • (To go and skulk- and sidle-learn to palp and tap the edge to crack us in.) • — What’d we feel there once we’d crossed? • Veritable thought-thick trunks of swampfoot oaks. • Something like ‘a shift in the structure of experience.’ • Here was Johnny Pep (shrapped home from war) branch-dragging agglomerating discards and disjecta. • His craving wove a plexus (more a house) from limbs and leaves. • He knit us in: he left us be.   He let us watch he watched us try (to climb to ape his crisscross weave) to pitch to plait the roof. • Something like ‘Yall strayboys welcome to be welcome if you work.’ • Didn’t we ‘work’ — particular night-hoots (and near-chromatic whistle-riffs) in echo; likenesses he whittled live from hickory showed us how. • He’d let us watch him strip and shave the shagbark bark to taste (to read) to mull the grain. • Something like ‘root-room’ I reckon.   Something like • ‘When Johnny Pep hitched home from war we took to carving (curing) scraplings into shapes.’