1630 Nature poems

Gravel path stirred by the rain fallen hard through the sweetgum trees, path that leads to the bend where the trail splits open in air: Everything is lighted evenly. It is a queer hour. The difference between light and shadow is the jealousy turn in the eye. The sun is all in the bottle cap that glints in the silt like a djinn’s brass hilt, in the way some lea  is frozen unto the air, some warm leaf heavywet here, and in how, just there: The strangeness strangely passes. And evening mounts. I can’t get the life out of my head. There is no glamour on this path but if I return I will find it in the thought of how I looked for some. I stoop to look at the veins that sweep like Latin roots in the satin of things, dream: The difference between something and nothing, which is nothing. The gravel lies on itself like dust lies on water. No, no, there are no mothers here. I bend to see it all, the little stones cast-wise. Things chase themselves away from the mode of things. I find a quartz, milked clear: I could not hear its accent if it sang, no matter how far off it formed. What dead hand I should feel if I lifted it.

Gold shed upon suckling gold, The time of the bole blackens, Of the dark mounted through dapple, While in the sealed apple The seed cradled toward cold. A gold on gold spent, Put by from an elm in its years Now its gilded of days, Over turf’s dishevelment; Where all which is green sickens, All the fresh shall be sere. All which is green sickens, And it is but for a time Those embered veinings blaze A year’s delirium; Or neared of other space, Unportioned azure shall close One of more, and which is, One which goes. Let the little pupils that will, Of vision, gaze for salt To whet their gazing, wit In one weather is high From burrow and lair, by Nether providences’ default An all’s accrued. And apposite, beyond Such primer beholdings, has Its long accounting known The beetle’s morsel thus Was rich, and the slug’s bed on The oak’s generations, deep Over the lark’s bones. In slough of Edens fast Wit in one weather shall stand, While millennia nibble at The sensual apple Toppled it net, Plenty in the palm of the hand, And the fallen not fallen, not lost From out its certitude— For our unbeggaring Has been gross. Few and late To cherish an immoderate Wish, hope’s calculus, Love’s hope; few to miss, From natural tally thrust, In the lime-girdled space Of choice, where alone Man can abandon what Is only his own; And in cold and tarrying Their rearisers sleep: While to the granite cheek Light’s purples bring Infinite their ministering, And past our finial And ragged crests, to keep Time’s ambient stood, Propose horizons from Their shadowy quarries; while, In an unwandered wood, Or under the indifferent foot, Is let fall, let fall a fruit, Through eternal leisures down, For but time’s unravelling.

A wind sways the pines, And below Not a breath of wild air; Still as the mosses that glow On the flooring and over the lines Of the roots here and there. The pine-tree drops its dead; They are quiet, as under the sea. Overhead, overhead Rushes life in a race, As the clouds the clouds chase; And we go, And we drop like the fruits of the tree, Even we, Even so.

A leaf the green that a child would choose if asked to draw a leaf. * This heavy-petalled rose is humid as the accent of my current correspondent. * Trees unberried by bird. Trees unleafed by beetle. * My correspondent is a tentative man and I am unaccustomed to tentative men. * White rose blossom browning at the edges. Paperback book. * Inside, my mother humming a song I’ve never heard. * Kinds of holiness. * Trees unbarked by winter deer. * My correspondent will not let me love him. * Green things make such mild noise. * I uncross my legs to find, with a bare foot, that sun has warmed the stone. I partake of the sun. * And the stone.

They lie in parallel rows, on ice, head to tail, each a foot of luminosity barred with black bands, which divide the scales’ radiant sections like seams of lead in a Tiffany window. Iridescent, watery prismatics: think abalone, the wildly rainbowed mirror of a soapbubble sphere, think sun on gasoline. Splendor, and splendor, and not a one in any way distinguished from the other —nothing about them of individuality. Instead they’re all exact expressions of the one soul, each a perfect fulfilment of heaven’s template, mackerel essence. As if, after a lifetime arriving at this enameling, the jeweler’s made uncountable examples, each as intricate in its oily fabulation as the one before Suppose we could iridesce, like these, and lose ourselves entirely in the universe of shimmer—would you want to be yourself only, unduplicatable, doomed to be lost? They’d prefer, plainly, to be flashing participants, multitudinous. Even now they seem to be bolting forward, heedless of stasis. They don’t care they’re dead and nearly frozen, just as, presumably, they didn’t care that they were living: all, all for all, the rainbowed school and its acres of brilliant classrooms, in which no verb is singular, or every one is. How happy they seem, even on ice, to be together, selfless, which is the price of gleaming.

Sometimes you watch them going out to sea On such a day as this, in the worst of weathers, Their boat holding ten or a dozen of them, In black rubber suits crouched around the engine housing, Tanks of air, straps and hoses, and for their feet Enormous flippers. The bow, with such a load on board, Hammers through the whitecaps, while they talk; Junonian girls, Praxitelean boys, pelted on By bursting clouds, by spray, eventually heave The tanks upon their backs, the boat drifts at anchor, And down they go to the sea floor, by the foggy headland. At least, you can presume they kick the flippers And plunge to where the water is more calm. The cool Instructors must keep eyes and ears Open. Accidents out there, they happen. You might imagine scraps Of cultural débris, a broken pot, a ring, a cogwheel Come up, clutched in a palm, and interesting, A wave pattern in it, the blade of a sword, When a lucky diver breaks again the surface. Time, Time and again frigate and schooner cracked Blown against the rocks, holed below the water line. Even an inscription Might now be coming up from those green deeps. Yet the divers do their silent thing. On the sea floor Expect only the sea, a multitude of sand without an hourglass. Round somebody’s ankle idly it swarms. A diver Hangs by a thread of breath in solitude there. Some go down In all simplicity curious; to have tales to tell; And who knows, what they learn Just might, long after this, be usable.

Driving through hot brushy country in the late autumn, I saw a hawk crucified on a barbed-wire fence. I guess as a kind of advertisement to other hawks, saying from the pages of a leading women’s magazine, “She’s beautiful, but burn all the maps to your body. I’m not here of my own choosing.”

Blizzard to lilac. Dandelion to leaf. Endless variation of seasons I note in passing, smells I cannot smell: rotting gardens, feces, musk of cat. These two run in front of me, golden shoulder to patchwork, heads lifted or lowered into scent, tongues lolling. Ears damp with their own spittle and each other's tell me, tethered a pace behind, their journey's epic: tipping forward to the familiar or stranger's distant yap; angling to my breathing, whispered praise, my slightest suggestion. Ignored. The shepherd throws herself into any whirring wheel, to herd the neighbor's tractor mower or the UPS truck's packets home; pulling her back, the golden's oblivious ballast, instinct heading always for the gutter's deepest puddle, her own way within the forked leash's one-foot range. As we pass, the clans set up their barking, as if we were news, gathering center of a congenial warning din—mine answer with disturbances of pace, an extra pull or lollop, grins thrown slant-eyed over shoulders until one hears a call she can't ignore, surrenders to baying's ferocious joy moving through muscle and bone. Moving storm, storm's eye: happy universes whirl in their skins as I do in mine. Unknowable, their fate. Mediums between foreign principalities, they're tied to me, to each other, by my will, by love; to that other realm by song, and tooth, and blood.

Speeding, without destination, after dark torrents have poured & been returned at home, the skies above mirror my mood, windshield wipers knifing through sheets, back roads slick with pooling, when a shard of cloudlessness opens. Pulling over, cutting the ignition, I unstitch myself from the humid seat, still fuming, to greet a full spectrum of color arcing past the treetops in lockstep with its fainter inverse. Archer's bow, hem of the sun god's coat, bridge between worlds, reconciliation & pardon. They don't last.

Scarred hemlock roots, Oaks in mail, and willow-shoots Spring’s first-knighted; Clinging aspens grouped between, Slender, misty-green, Faintly affrighted: Far hills behind, Somber growth, with sunlight lined, On their edges; Banks hemmed in with maiden-hair, And the straight and fair Phalanx of sedges: Wee wings and eyes, Wild blue gemmy dragon-flies, Fearless rangers; Drowsy turtles in a tribe Diving, with a gibe Muttered at strangers; Wren, bobolink, Robin, at the grassy brink; Great frogs jesting; And the beetle, for no grief Half-across his leaf Sighing and resting; In the keel’s way, Unwithdrawing bream at play, Till from branches Chestnut-blossoms, loosed aloft, Graze them with their soft Full avalanches! This is very odd! Boldly sings the river-god: ‘Pilgrim rowing! From the Hyperborean air Wherefore, and O where Should man be going?’ Slave to a dream, Me no urgings and no theme Can embolden; Now no more the oars swing back, Drip, dip, till black Waters froth golden. Musketaquid! I have loved thee, all unbid, Earliest, longest; Thou hast taught me thine own thrift: Here I sit, and drift Where the wind’s strongest. If, furthermore, There be any pact ashore, I forget it! If, upon a busy day Beauty make delay, Once over, let it! Only, — despite Thee, who wouldst unnerve me quite Like a craven,— Best the current be not so, Heart and I must row Into our haven!