1630 Nature poems

She wants to grow from the rich-rotten trunk of the stamp left to sprout in the chain-linked alley yard. She wants to be born there. Or out of dry wind rushing debris around and cleaning the world like a slate that hasn’t yet written how her birth will be if she be born slick-wet and shimmering in rings like gas spill, born from long trickles run off curb-piled snow that flows in curtains any northern winter when it is possible to burn in water, when flakes against skin so cold brand their pattern on the new-thought, engraved self.

I’m standing in field 17 of the long series, employing my scythe. Sometimes a conceptual dog bounds past me, though it’s never my conceptual dog. Occasionally future laureates gather for colloquium, though they’re rarely my future laureates. Thus, evening proceeds precisely the way the handbook describes it: as a proceeding: a runnel: shallow and babbling. Into it a stranger appears. He looks like my friend. I ask him, Are you my friend? Gravity telegraphs its heavy message through the lolling vines. The strangers says, I’ve sold all my clothes and am considering, for a career, perpetual suffering. The sun slides a tongue down the nape of the grain elevator. Lowing cattle. It’s the fourth of July. In Spain. I say, You are most vague and mysterious, friend. The dog paces. I set my scythe aside and tell him, I have employed this scythe mercilessly all my life and still everywhere these stalks extend. He says, Someone is always worse off than us even at our most pitiable. Yes, I say. I read it once in a magazine. And we laugh, let our enormous bellies jangle. It is good to laugh with my friend and let the scythe cool, I say. Yes, he says. Good.

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness. And suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand. That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive, Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture. O my love, where are they, where are they going The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder. Wilno, 1936

There's a certain sadness to this body of water adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds, handful of ducks, the water color manmade. A still life. And still life's a cold exercise in looking back, back to Florida, craning my neck like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin. As for the scrub oaks, the hot wind in the leaves was language, Spanish moss—dusky, parasitic— an obsession: I wanted to live in it. (One professor in exile did, covered himself in the stuff as a joke— then spent a week removing mites.) That's enough. The fields of rushes lay filled with water, and I said farewell, my high ship an old, red Volvo DL, gone to another coast, another peninsula, one without sleep or amphibious music. Tonight, in flight from San Francisco— because everything is truer at a remove— I watch the man I love watch the turn of the Sacramento River, then Sacramento, lit city of legislation and flat land. I think of Florida, how flat. I think of forgetting Florida. And then the landscape grows black.

So many forget-me-nots, with their white centers, scattered, you'd say, if there weren't so many everywhere, as many as the stars last night in between the branches above the porch, behind the house. Was it an argument or were there just things they had to say? I could have faith in so many creatures— the old setter from the neighbor yard who follows me around the corner and no longer, the chick with its new beak just past breakable whose lighter top feathers have a bit of flight, any mother bear— you say things and the next day it's like they don't matter, we want our faces to alter though we don't want to get older, neither do we want to get younger, repetition with less knowledge is ridiculous, just ask the Greeks, you get to keep being a tree but without the branch that showed the sky your starlike shape? I don't think so. Steadiness can be useful, but my loyalty loves a form that will follow me through changes. At a diagonal the dark woods on the back slope have enough space to walk between, not enough to hide. He looks into them and writes notes to his mother, she looks into them and finds alignment, or looks for what she wants. She has a human skeleton on her desk. He has a protractor. I had wishes for both of them yesterday but the weather has become so kindly, so temperate, I forget what blessings they don't think they have.

1 Gently disintegrate me Said nothing at all. Is there still time to say Said I myself lying In a bower of bramble Into which I have fallen. Look through my eyes up At blue with not anything We could have ever arranged Slowly taking place. Above the spires of the fox Gloves and above the bracken Tops with their young heads Recognising the wind, The armies of the empty Blue press me further Into Zennor Hill. If I half-close my eyes The spiked light leaps in And I am here as near Happy as I will get In the sailing afternoon. 2 Enter a cloud. Between The head of Zennor and Gurnard’s Head the long Marine horizon makes A blue wall or is it A distant table-top Of the far-off simple sea. Enter a cloud. O cloud, I see you entering from Your west gathering yourself Together into a white Headlong. And now you move And stream out of the Gurnard, The west corner of my eye. Enter a cloud. The cloud’s Changing shape is crossing Slowly only an inch Above the line of the sea. Now nearly equidistant Between Zennor and Gurnard’s Head, an elongated White anvil is sailing Not wanting to be a symbol. 3 Said nothing at all. And proceeds with no idea Of destination along The sea bearing changing Messages. Jean in London, Lifting a cup, looking Abstractedly out through Her Hampstead glass will never Be caught by your new shape Above the chimneys. Jean, Jean, do you not see This cloud has been thought of And written on Zennor Hill. 4 The cloud is going beyond What I can see or make. Over up-country maybe Albert Strick stops and waves Caught in the middle of teeling Broccoli for the winter. The cloud is not there yet. From Gurnard's Head to Zennor Head the level line Crosses my eyes lying On buzzing Zennor Hill. The cloud is only a wisp And gone behind the Head. It is funny I got the sea's Horizontal slightly surrealist. Now when I raise myself Out of the bracken I see The long empty blue Between the fishing Gurnard And Zennor. It was a cloud The language at my time's Disposal made use of. 5 Thank you. And for your applause. It has been a pleasure. I Have never enjoyed speaking more. May I also thank the real ones Who have made this possible. First, the cloud itself. And now Gurnard's Head and Zennor Head. Also recognise How I have been helped By Jean and Madron's Albert Strick (He is a real man.) And good words like brambles, Bower, spiked, fox, anvil, teeling. The bees you heard are from A hive owned by my friend Garfield down there below In the house by Zennor Church. The good blue sun is pressing Me into Zennor Hill. Gently disintegrate me Said nothing at all.

One day in that room, a small rat. Two days later, a snake. Who, seeing me enter, whipped the long stripe of his body under the bed, then curled like a docile house-pet. I don’t know how either came or left. Later, the flashlight found nothing. For a year I watched as something—terror? happiness? grief?— entered and then left my body. Not knowing how it came in, Not knowing how it went out. It hung where words could not reach it. It slept where light could not go. Its scent was neither snake nor rat, neither sensualist nor ascetic. There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing. Through them the belled herds travel at will, long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

This rose-tree is not made to bear The violet blue, nor lily fair, Nor the sweet mignionet: And if this tree were discontent, Or wished to change its natural bent, It all in vain would fret. And should it fret, you would suppose It ne’er had seen its own red rose, Nor after gentle shower Had ever smelled its rose’s scent, Or it could ne’er be discontent With its own pretty flower. Like such a blind and senseless tree As I’ve imagined this to be, All envious persons are: With care and culture all may find Some pretty flower in their own mind, Some talent that is rare.

The snake, alphabet of one glide, swims with its keepsake head, periscoping, and then we lose it in the pond grass, lashed among the bottom-feeders. Pocketing goggles, my gaze tends pineward, to the driest sky in twenty years (also passing, rain predicted), a month of sun days. In Fairbanks, all-night baseball and a picnic breakfast Alaskan-style. Someone’s driving south, to Anchorage, in that luscious uplift that here will linger long enough for us to get a sunburn, to get down, to get stung, to get the hang of happiness and get going. Get the picture? I do, but just for the moment, which is why I want it monumental, equestrian, astride, however I can get it. What’s passing is June, another; peony’s scent; postcards from the lower forty-eight. The frog I trod sprang back intact, all its receptors set on July.

On a slab of Jurassic shale, an ovate body, legs fine as eyelashes, the mayfly's precise signature, consummate, immortal. Now its descendents, in a tumult of mating, roil the air on Koerner's sluggish creek below the hill where the Ebenezer Baptist church, its doors agape, declines daily into dust and rubble. Beyond the church, the graveyard encroached by nightshade and nettle, its stones listing or broken or gone, a few bearing words now scarcely visible: Eliza, Beloved Wife . . . In Perpetual . . . . A million years from now the stricken stones will be scoured clean and ephemerids will rise each spring to dance above the clouded waters.