1630 Nature poems

Empty cattle trailers Rumbled dummy thunder Down the road all day, and now tonight, Heat lightning flashes more of the same fake rain. It’s just as well. I couldn’t get to sleep, And now it ricochets across the sky With empty loads of light. We’ve had a month Of drought that tightens dirt around my pond. The local wells are dry. But I’ve retired, Threw out my wand. I hate this time of year. Roux can burn if flour Sticks in skillet butter. I’ve been cooking up a storm myself, My Daddy’s filé gumbo recipe. He used to be a chef on oil rigs Until the hurricane. I heard the waves That killed him, and I hear them every year. It’s emptiness that fills me. That’s my skill. I hear the vacant rain before it falls. It’s like the murmur of a spiraled shell. Hurricane weather, stewing Deep for landfall, spewing Rain-a-plenty in the Gulf and here In Tennessee they always have a lack Of something. Two men called today for wells. I told them both to go to hell, and now They think I’m sinful, not to use my skill. They stand to lose so much, but don’t we all. I lost a lot in Hurricane Camille And even now can’t hear the end of it. More heat lightning flashes, Absent rain that passes Over clouds, and I can make it out, Each gurgling current under withered fields, Down kitchen drains. The neighbors think I’m crazy, Up all hours, but they’ll never know The screaming voice inside a breaker’s rage Or how it simmers in my ear. I hate The sound of water. Give me one good chance To make it silent. I’d be right as rain.

They are skimming the lake with wooden hooks. Where the oak throws its handful of shadows Children are gathering fireflies. I wait in the deep olive flux As their cries ricochet out of the dark. Lights spear the water. I hear the oak speak. It foists its mouthful of sibilants On a sky involved with a stillborn moon, On the stock-still cottages. I lean Into the dark. On tiny splints, One trellised rose is folding back Its shawls. The beacon strikes the lake. Rowboats bob on the thick dark Over my head. My fingers wave Goodbye, remember me. I love This cold, these captive stars. I shake My blanket of shadows. I breathe in: Dark replenishes my two wineskins. My eyes are huge, two washed-out mollusks. Oars fall, a shower of violet spray. When will my hosts deliver me, Tearing me with their wooden hooks? Lights flicker where my live heart kicked. I taste pine gum, they have me hooked. They reel me in, a displaced anchor. The cygnets scatter. I rise, I nod, Wrapped in a jacket of dark weed. I dangle, I am growing pure, I fester on this wooden prong. An angry nail is in my tongue.

Now I can see: even the trees

Quick swim up through my headlights: gold eye a startle in black: green swift glance raking mine. A full second we held each other, then gone. Gone. And how did I know what to call it? Lynx, the only possible reply though I’d never seen one. The car filling with it: moonlight, piñon: a cat’s acrid smell of terror. How quickly the gray body fled, swerving to avoid my light. And how often that sight returns to me, shames me to know how much more this fragment matters. More than the broad back of a man I loved. More than the image of my friend, cancer-struck, curled by her toilet. More than my regret for the child I did not have which I thought once would pierce me, utterly. Nothing beside that dense muscle, faint gold guard hairs stirring the dark. And if I keep these scraps of it, what did it keep of me? A flight, a thunder. A shield of light dropped before the eyes, pinned inside that magnificent skull only time would release. Split back, fade and reveal. Wind would open him. Sun would turn him commonplace: a knot of flies, a rib cage of shredded tendon, wasp-nest fragile. The treasure of him, like anything, gone. Even now, I thumb that face like a coin I cannot spend. If I ever lived, I lived in him, fishing the cold trout-thick streams, waking to snow, dying when he died, which is a comfort. I must say this. Otherwise, I myself do not exist. It looked at me a moment. A flash of green, of gold and white. Then the dark came down again between us. Once, I was afraid of being changed. Now that is done. The lynx has me in its eye. I am already diminished.

I I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota. The stubble field catches the last growth of sun. The soybeans are breathing on all sides. Old men are sitting before their houses on car seats In the small towns. I am happy, The moon rising above the turkey sheds. II The small world of the car Plunges through the deep fields of the night, On the road from Willmar to Milan. This solitude covered with iron Moves through the fields of night Penetrated by the noise of crickets. III Nearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge, And water kneeling in the moonlight. In small towns the houses are built right on the ground; The lamplight falls on all fours on the grass. When I reach the river, the full moon covers it. A few people are talking, low, in a boat.

The sun climbed the rigging of a mackerel sky, with me and my daughter following west, and then the sudden, thick lashed, chestnut eye of that poor deer, flashed as we collided. Busted bumper, her bounding toward the pines— clean-limbed, light, and sapling-sound, she vanished. Stopping on the shoulder, I dreaded what damage my own poor dear and her thick-lashed, chestnut eyes had suffered, struck by their shared innocence and that awful force; but her beaming face, sunflower-broad, was filled by this thrill, with her eager as the deer that the day might move along, and the sun—without looking down—should keep to its climbing.

The clouds shouldered a path up the mountains East of Ocampo, and then descended, Scraping their bellies gray on the cracked shingles of slate. They entered the valley, and passed the roads that went Trackless, the houses blown open, their cellars creaking And lined with the bottles that held their breath for years. They passed the fields where the trees dried thin as hat racks And the plow’s tooth bit the earth for what endured. But what continued were the wind that plucked the birds spineless And the young who left with a few seeds in each pocket, Their belts tightened on the fifth notch of hunger— Under the sky that deafened from listening for rain.

An hour inland from Bangor, Maine, over rolling hills, in an oval pasture surrounded by giant conifers, the forest floor bejeweled with ruby-studded mushrooms, I watch the sheep sing, if bleating could be called a song. Maybe someone in a grove long ago saw a man attached to a beast of burden and so the concept of the satyr was born. Memory is the past reversed. I once went out with a sailor, a Spaniard, from Andalucía. We met at sea where I worked the roulette wheel in the ship’s casino. His legs were slightly bowed, his voice gruff and torn, and when he came the sound seemed to climb up not from his throat but from his feet smelling of earth and sea and grief— a deep song Lorca called duende. It wasn’t pretty. His blue and red and purple briefs soaking in a bucket by the cabin door. He told me once when he was a boy his grandmother had caught him trying to fuck a chicken.The poor chicken, he laughed, his saddle-worn Andalucían laugh, feathers flying everywhere, his grandmother screaming. And what to call those half-human, half-chicken kinds of days: scratching and clawing at the earth, bathed in dust, trying not to think about the simmering anise, peppercorn, and broth. When I visited him, he met me at the airport. Then the long train ride south through field after field of sunflowers.Por la tarde families paraded,por la noche, only men and boys and extranjeras—foreign women— out past sunset. In an empty disco six or seven guys danced, throwing themselves around madly, slamming into each other to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Franco had died a few years back. From my window that night, a full moon, shadows of the town square, the boarded-up cathedral, a cat in heat, the smell of blood oranges. In the morning his grandmother, all in black, asleep stooped in a chair outside my door. Nearby the ruins of an ancient Roman temple, goats on hind legs eating the pale green leaves from olive trees.

Taking root in windy sand is not an easy way to go about finding a place to stay. A ditchbank or wood's-edge has firmer ground. In a loose world though something can be started— a root touch water, a tip break sand— Mounds from that can rise on held mounds, a gesture of building, keeping, a trapping into shape. Firm ground is not available ground.

we floated asleep, as the house beams were carved with birds & waves through the night not knowing how to walk through sand dunes not knowing the sand blue color of your veins it is tiring to wake each day to the frost your out breath melancholy, smooth