1630 Nature poems

(lines 71-99) Frost shall freeze fire eat wood earth shall breed ice shall bridge water a shield wear. One shall break frost’s fetters free the grain from wonder-lock —One who all can. Winter shall wane fair weather come again the sun-warmed summer! The sound unstill the deep dead wave is darkest longest. Holly shall to the pyre hoard be scattered when the body’s numb. Name is best. A king shall win a queen with goods beakers, bracelets. Both must first be kind with gifts. Courage must wax war-mood in the man, the woman grow up beloved among her people, be light of mood hold close a rune-word be roomy-hearted at hoard-share and horse-giving. When the hall drinks she shall always and everywhere before any company greet first the father of aethelings with the first draught —deft to his hand she holds the horn— and when they are at home together know the right way to run their household. The ship must be nailed the shield framed from the light linden. But how loving the welcome of the Frisian wife when floats offshore the keel come home again! She calls him within walls, her own husband —hull’s at anchor!— washes salt-stains from his stiff shirt brings out clothes clean and fresh for her lord on land again. Love’s need is met.

When we got close enough we could hear rivers inside the ice heaving splits the groaning of a ledge about to calve. Strewn in the moraine fresh moose sign— tawny oblong pellets breaking up sharp black shale. In one breath ice and air— history, the record of breaking— prophecy, the warning of what's yet to break out from under four stories of bone-crushing turquoise retreating.

Things in the dark exist but are not realized. Perhaps with wings they wait for enacting light. I start out as the sky descends to the visible spectrum and begins. Midmorning I find in a lab a blue magnetic fluid: revolving in the stress of gauss, the source of blue resides. November nights, up to the first snow, derive from this seat of blue. I spend a month reflecting at Palomar. My delicate fourteen tons I bring to bear on galaxies: their lonely shine harbors on my dustless, understanding curve. I come to a mountain out of season. The brass benchmark telling the height is under ice. Without witness, without cease a blizzard pummels the summit's face. I reach the pole. Here at the axis the wobble and grind is audible. My compass tries to point straight down. It, too, deceived: Having achieved one absolute, the source of north, to find that south surrounds, is all but it. The Humboldt Current has my boat and its mile of line straight down. Now and then, fishermen haul in the inexplicable along with seabream, haddock, squid. I hook a coelacanth, thought long extinct, and brain it with an oar. Nose to the bottom I shove off from the hundred fathom curve. Slow footage of mud unreeling through my mind, the miles of decline become my age. Hauled up someday by accident, rupturing in the lost pressure, my look will say how knowing feels. Living among the trilobites I learn you cross great lengths of time by stilling the waiting in yourself. From scavengers I see how you can live off your own dead kind. I gum the grit of a tidal flat and have no name. A chance letter brings me home, telling how I was found. Returned I sit like water in a jar, light from a window passing through, a slow rain of precipitate remembering the bottom.

Sometimes  ,  when i'm very tired  ,    i think of extremophiles    ,   chemolithoautotrophs & others with     power for changing not-life into lives  ,    of those that eat rock & fire in volcanoes   ,     before the death of the world but after   the death of a human ,    of their taste for ammonia or iron  ,     sulfur & carbon ,   somehow enough of it to go on ...     As workers taste revolt       ,   they grow at the vents of oceans   ,     turning mute vapor into respiration            ,   changing unhinged matter to hinges        ,  near the rims of sea trenches or the caves     ...     Our friend wrote of writers living              in gray hiding, ,     of those who love glass & early freedom   ,    steep sand & late freedom       ,     sex among gentle or bitter grasses     ,   those with a taste for blue or belligerence   ,obscure lives, she called them               ,   the writers of radical mind     … The living prefer life    ,  mostly they do ,   they are ravenous ,    making shapes in groups as the dying grow     one thought until the end ,   wanting more specifics   ,desert or delay until the i        drops away into i am not here,   the mineral other pumps & vast vapors  ,    ridges & shadows beyond the single life it had not thought of—

On paunchy green hills in some province of China, you are the one I speak to. Someone buys a perfume, recalling that the bones of his beloved are small. When he writes the note, when he wraps the little bottle, he takes that into account. So do I. The subtlest trace of mind against your shoulders is your true skin. And I press myself to you. I hear the steady rhythm of your typing, the key of a borrowed pulse. But what difference does it make, that it is given? For a while it is mine to use, then your turn, but the pulse originates in the Child of Heaven who has hearts to spare. Some day you'll sink yourself into a frozen lake where paper ships were torched with the names of the missing. Some dead, some vanished. The flames consume all but the wisp of smoke on which a single word rises and water licks at the rest. So we are freed from a weight. Perennially your hills are filled with birds. Green hills, the deep mosses around your temples. They, the birds, are your faithful ones. As I am, naturally. Faithful to a world unknown, a world for us alone, paper-thin, and too fragile to speak of.

—“mu” twentieth part— The way we lay we mimed a body of water. It was this or that way with the dead and we were them. No one worried which... Millet beer made our legs go weak, loosed our tongues. “The dead,” we said, “are drowning of thirst,” gruff summons we muttered out loud in our sleep... It was a journey we were on, drawn-out scrawl we made a road of, long huthered hajj we were on. Raw strip of cloth we now rode, wishful, letterless book the ride we thumbed... Harp-headed ghost whose head we plucked incessantly. Bartered star.       Tethered run... It was a ride we knew we’d wish to return to. Every- thing was everything, nothing no less. No less newly arrived or ancestral, of late having to do with the naming of parts... Rolling hills rolled up like a rug, raw sprawl of a book within a book without a name known as Namless, not to be arrived at again... It was the Book of No Avail we were in did we dare name it, momentary kings and queens, fleet kingdom. Land fell away on all sides. Past Lag we caught ourselves, run weft at last adequate, shadowless, lit, left up Atet Street, legs tight, hill after hill after hill. Had it been a book Book of Opening the Book it would’ve been called, kept under lock and key... Hyperbolic arrest. Ra was on the box. It was after the end of the world... To lie on our backs looking into the dark was all there was worth doing, each the aroused eye one another sought, swore he or she saw we lay where love’s pharaonic torso lay deepest, wide-eyed all night without sleep... “String our heads with straw,” we said, half-skulls tied with catgut, strummed... Scratched our strummed heads, memory made us itch. Walked out weightless, air what eye was left... Someone said Rome, someone said destroy it. Atlantis, a third shouted out... Low ride among ruins notwithstanding we flew. Swam, if often seemed, underwater, oddly immersed, bodies long since bid goodbye, we lay in wait, remote muses kept us afloat. Something called pursuit had us by the nose. Wafted ether blown low, tilted floor, splintered feet. Throated bone... Rickety boat we rode... As though what we wanted was to be everywhere at once, an altered life lived on an ideal coast we’d lay washed up on, instancy and elsewhere endlessly entwined

These brown piles of stubble hills have failed. They should be more • It should be difficult but not impossible to transmute latitude into a thought a god could hold. • Barred light: dunes coming on and on. • The eye, yes, must move to prevent blank spots from making themselves known.

for Ben Fenton-Smith None are more familiar with dew than professional footballers. From early grades they are used to running through practice drills and hurling their burly frames through rucks while the moist chaff of wet grass under the winter lights softens their fall, accustoms the half- back to the slippery ball and writes green cuneiform on wet sandshoes. And they fear it in the morning, kicking off the dew in the ‘twos’ because they ignored a coach’s warning. Half their lives are spent in clouds of condensation or the cold heat of a winter sun where even the crowds seem like droplets on the concrete rose of the stadium. In the final days of their season , sweat-spangled on the eve of their triumph, the ball on a string and their plays honed, even the doubters believe. And the last day is, once again, already an aftermath: the ground’s been shaved and sucked dry by the noon sun and the paddock has become a paved and bristled hell for those who will collide with it and pinion flesh on earth, earth on flesh and spill blood for the sake of the game. Possession is the law; all are possessed. And when the crowd melts into the dry darkness, after that great red football’s booted between the uprights of the sky- scrapers and gone, the sky bawls cheerless little drops for the victors and decks the oval with the losers’ jewels.

DORINDA When death shall part us from these kids, And shut up our divided lids, Tell me, Thyrsis, prithee do, Whither thou and I must go. THYRSIS To the Elysium. DORINDA Oh, where is’t? THYRSIS A chaste soul can never miss’t. DORINDA I know no way but to our home, Is our cell Elysium? THYRSIS Turn thine eye to yonder sky, There the milky way doth lie; ’Tis a sure but rugged way, That leads to everlasting day. DORINDA There birds may nest, but how can I That have no wings and cannot fly? THYRSIS Do not sigh, fair nymph, for fire Hath no wings yet doth aspire Till it hit against the Pole: Heaven’s the centre of the soul. DORINDA But in Elysium how do they Pass eternity away? THYRSIS Oh, there’s neither hope nor fear, There’s no wolf, no fox, no bear. No need of dog to fetch our stray, Our Lightfoot we may give away; No oat-pipe’s needful; there thy ears May sleep with music of the spheres. DORINDA Oh sweet! Oh sweet! How I my future state By silent thinking antedate: I prithee let us spend our time to come In talking of Elysium. THYRSIS Then I’ll go on. There sheep are full Of sweetest grass and softest wool; There birds sing consorts, garlands grow, Cool winds do whisper, springs do flow. There always is a rising sun, And day is ever but begun. Shepherds there bear equal sway, And every nymph’s a Queen of May. DORINDA Ah me, ah me! THYRSIS Dorinda, why dost cry? DORINDA I’m sick, I’m sick, and fain would die. Convince me now that this is true By bidding with me all adieu. THYRSIS I cannot live without thee, I, I’ll for thee, much more with thee, die. CHORUS Then let us give Corillo charge o’ the sheep, And thou and I’ll pick poppies, and them steep In wine, and drink on’t even till we weep, So shall we smoothly pass away in sleep.

The jellyfish float in the bay shallows like schools of clouds, a dozen identical — is it right to call them creatures, these elaborate sacks of nothing? All they seem is shape, and shifting, and though a whole troop of undulant cousins go about their business within a single wave's span, every one does something unlike: this one a balloon open on both ends but swollen to its full expanse, this one a breathing heart, this a pulsing flower. This one a rolled condom, or a plastic purse swallowing itself, that one a Tiffany shade, this a troubled parasol. This submarine opera's all subterfuge and disguise, its plot a fabulous tangle of hiding and recognition: nothing but trope, nothing but something forming itself into figures then refiguring, sheer ectoplasm recognizable only as the stuff of metaphor. What can words do but link what we know to what we don't, and so form a shape? Which shrinks or swells, configures or collapses, blooms even as it is described into some unlikely marine chiffon: a gown for Isadora? Nothing but style. What binds one shape to another also sets them apart — but what's lovelier than the shapeshifting transparence of like and as: clear, undulant words? We look at alien grace, unfettered by any determined form, and we say: balloon, flower, heart, condom, opera, lampshade, parasol, ballet. Hear how the mouth, so full of longing for the world, changes its shape?