1630 Nature poems

I have seen the Brown Recluse Spider run with a net in her hand, or rather, what resembled a net, what resembled a hand. She ran down the gleaming white floor of the bathtub, trailing a frail swirl of hair, and in it the hull of a beetle lay woven. The hair was my wife’s, long and dark, a few loose strands, a curl she might idly have turned on a finger, she might idly have twisted, speaking to me, and the legs of the beetle were broken.

Now is the time of year when bees are wild and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants in the bright, late-September out-of-doors. I have found their dried husks in my clothes. They are dervishes because they are dying, one last sting, a warm place to squeeze a drop of venom or of honey. After the stroke we thought would be her last my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped a nurse across the face. Then she stood up, walked outside, and lay down in the snow. Two years later there is no other way to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light as an empty hive, and she is breathing.

How it must have been for them, when wind came to strike cottonwoods they called home down —silver bridges across a gun-smoke creek-bed, joining yellow meadow to meadow...how it must have been like the beginning of time, when the first one beat great wings (though so silent a field mouse would never even hear before talons sinking in...) and rose over the Blues to find this valley with others following. And their human eyes, forward-gazing in their round faces, they turned toward sound to catch it in feather discs, their hearing tuned beyond human imagining...and then they were gone, like mist dissipating in the lowlands, and an eye trained toward their going might, squinting, distinguish signs of intention written by pinions, stroking damp air in their westward rowing. And we told ourselves all water eventually finds the sea—our coming, their going—so synchronous; this was simply something we wanted, more than knowing, wholly to believe.

Even with insects— some can sing, some can’t.

The light passes from ridge to ridge, from flower to flower— the hepaticas, wide-spread under the light grow faint— the petals reach inward, the blue tips bend toward the bluer heart and the flowers are lost. The cornel-buds are still white, but shadows dart from the cornel-roots— black creeps from root to root, each leaf cuts another leaf on the grass, shadow seeks shadow, then both leaf and leaf-shadow are lost.

The evening darkens over After a day so bright The windcapt waves discover That wild will be the night. There’s sound of distant thunder. The latest sea-birds hover Along the cliff’s sheer height; As in the memory wander Last flutterings of delight, White wings lost on the white. There’s not a ship in sight; And as the sun goes under Thick clouds conspire to cover The moon that should rise yonder. Thou art alone, fond lover.

Spirit that breathest through my lattice, thou That cool’st the twilight of the sultry day, Gratefully flows thy freshness round my brow: Thou hast been out upon the deep at play, Riding all day the wild blue waves till now, Roughening their crests, and scattering high their spray And swelling the white sail. I welcome thee To the scorched land, thou wanderer of the sea! Nor I alone—a thousand blossoms round Inhale thee in the fulness of delight; And languid forms rise up, and pulses bound Livelier, at coming of the wind of night; And, languishing to hear thy grateful sound, Lies the vast inland stretched beyond the sight. Go forth into the gathering shade; go forth, God’s blessing breathed upon the fainting earth! Go, rock the little wood-bird in his nest, Curl the still waters, bright with stars, and rouse The wide old wood from his majestic rest, Summoning from the innumerable boughs The strange, deep harmonies that haunt his breast: Pleasant shall be thy way where meekly bows. The shutting flower, and darkling waters pass, And where the o’ershadowing branches sweep the grass. The faint old man shall lean his silver head To feel thee; thou shalt kiss the child asleep, And dry the moistened curls that overspread His temples, while his breathing grows more deep: And they who stand about the sick man’s bed, Shall joy to listen to thy distant sweep, And softly part his curtains to allow Thy visit, grateful to his burning brow. Go—but the circle of eternal change, Which is the life of nature, shall restore, With sounds and scents from all thy mighty range Thee to thy birthplace of the deep once more; Sweet odours in the sea-air, sweet and strange, Shall tell the home-sick mariner of the shore; And, listening to thy murmur, he shall deem He hears the rustling leaf and running stream.

When the river rose that year, we were beside it and ourselves with fear; not that it would do anything to us, mind you—our hopes were much too high for that— but there was always that remote, unacknowledged possibility that we had thrown one stone too many, by the handful, and that by some force of nature, as they called it, it might rain and rain for days, as it had been, with nothing to hold it and the structure back, and with everything to blame, including children on into late summer and all the years ahead, when it would be ours to bear, to do much more with than remember and let it go at that—some mud, some driftwood, some space of sky as a reminder before getting on with the world again; no, the balance was ours to share, and responsibility for rivers had as much to do with anything as rain on the roof and sweet fish for supper, as forests and trembling and berries at sunrise; thus it was, then, that we kept our watch, that we kept our wits about us and all the respect we could muster, sitting in silence, sleeping in shifts, and when the fire died, everyone was there to keep it alive; somehow, though, in the middle of the night, despite our vigils, our dreams, our admonitions, our structure, our people, and all our belongings broke free with a shudder and went drifting away— past the landing, the swing, the anchored cages, down through the haunted rapids, never to be found; when we awoke that morning, the sun was back, the river had receded under our measuring stick, and everything had been astonishingly replaced, including people and pets, the structure intact, but in the solitude of all our faces as we ate, the knowledge was there, of what we all had done, and that everything would never be the same.

First, night opened out. Bodies took root from rotting salt and seawater into evidence of red life. Relentless waves pumped tidal air into a single heartbeat. In the pulp of shadow and space, water sucked our people from sleep. That’s how it all began. At least that’s all we can remember to tell. It began with water and heartbeat. In minutes we tunneled through corn woman’s navel into tinges of moist red men and women. Yawning, we collected our chins, knees, breasts, and sure-footed determination. A few thousand years before Moses parted the Red Sea, and the God with three heads was born in the Middle East, the Choctaw people danced our homeland infra red. Finally when the stranger’s arms reached to strangle the West, Grandmother eavesdropped on the three-faced deity who said that chaos was coming. When he puckered his lips and tried to kiss her she made it rain on him. “Maybe you’ve forgotten you were born of water and women,” she said, walking away laughing.

By the stream, where the ground is soft and gives, under the slightest pressure—even the fly would leave its footprint here and the paw of the shrew the crescent of its claws like the strokes of a chisel in clay; where the lightest chill, lighter than the least rumor of winter, sets the reeds to a kind of speaking, and a single drop of rain leaves a crater to catch the first silver glint of sun when the clouds slide away from each other like two tired lovers, and the light returns, pale, though brightened by the last chapter of late autumn: copper, rusted oak, gold aspen, and the red pages of maple, the wind leafing through to the end the annals of beech, the slim volumes of birch, the elegant script of the ferns ... for the birds, it is all notations for a coda, for the otter an invitation to the river, and for the deer—a dream in which to disappear, light-footed on the still open book of earth, adding the marks of their passage, adding it all in, waiting only for the first thick flurry of snowflakes for cover, soft cover that carries no title, no name.