1630 Nature poems

I'm herdsman of a flock. The sheep are my thoughts And my thoughts are all sensations. I think with my eyes and my ears And my hands and feet And nostrils and mouth. To think a flower is to see and smell it. To eat a fruit is to sense its savor. And that is why, when I feel sad, In a day of heat, because of so much joy And lay me down in the grass to rest And close my sun-warmed eyes, I feel my whole body relaxed in reality And know the whole truth and am happy.

First there was some other order of things never spoken but in dreams of darkest creation. Then there was black earth, lake, the face of light on water. Then the thick forest all around that light, and then the human clay whose blood we still carry rose up in us who remember caves with red bison painted in their own blood, after their kind. A wildness swam inside our mothers, desire through closed eyes, a new child wearing the red, wet mask of birth, delivered into this land already wounded, stolen and burned beyond reckoning. Red is this yielding land turned inside out by a country of hunters with iron, flint and fire. Red is the fear that turns a knife back against men, holds it at their throats, and they cannot see the claw on the handle, the animal hand that haunts them from some place inside their blood. So that is hunting, birth, and one kind of death. Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds. Red was the infinite fruit of stolen bodies. The doctors wanted to know what invented disease how wounds healed from inside themselves how life stands up in skin, if not by magic. They divined the red shadows of leeches that swam in white bowls of water: they believed stars in the cup of sky. They cut the wall of skin to let what was bad escape but they were reading the story of fire gone out and that was a science. As for the animal hand on death’s knife, knives have as many sides as the red father of war who signs his name in the blood of other men. And red was the soldier who crawled through a ditch of human blood in order to live. It was the canal of his deliverance. It is his son who lives near me. Red is the thunder in our ears when we meet. Love, like creation, is some other order of things. Red is the share of fire I have stolen from root, hoof, fallen fruit. And this was hunger. Red is the human house I come back to at night swimming inside the cave of skin that remembers bison. In that round nation of blood we are all burning, red, inseparable fires the living have crawled and climbed through in order to live so nothing will be left for death at the end. This life in the fire, I love it. I want it, this life.

Everyone has a cousin Benjamin Bunny. Peter said a walk would do him good. The edge of the wood. Peter did not enjoy himself anymore. He never would again. The brooding lettuces in their falcon hoods. The coppice gate wound shut by weeds, the jaws of life trying to keep it closed tight but anyone can climb it. As a child I played on a gate in a neighborhood park that swung of itself and sounded like the distress call of a rabbit. I stood on the bottom slat and backed in and out of the air. I’ll never get out of here. The gate was pure folly, without fencing on either side, Greek tragedy staged around a doorway the imagination strains to enter. I was raised in an aisle seat with an eye line of an actor about to come through from behind it. Melodramatic onions grew wild. I cried and cried until someone said it’s okay to cry, it means the onions are fresh. Every dream begins with a threshold. Meat in the driveway where dogs tipped the garbage. Where’s your mouth? There is a whistle you can buy that makes the sound of a rabbit screaming hunters use to call whatever they want out of the thicket because everything they want wants rabbit for dinner. Move your hand along the shaft to change the call from jack to cotton- tail and back again. Once you see them nose out of the interior at your bidding what stops you from sounding every single day? All day? The shrill imagined rabbit’s canned terror. You can do it with a reed of grass. Cup your hands. Everything alive is listening. I knew a hunter who could do a spot-on fawn whose suffering would bring a doe into the open every time. He didn’t want a doe, though. He wanted a buck. Here’s what I can’t stand to acknowledge: when bucks hear the sound of the fawn my friend makes with his mouth they come, too, not in pity, but in lust, so badly they want the doe drawn by the yearning of a fawn in need of her. Everything is within range suddenly, and who am I to judge. He mounts her relief and spring comes. No. He takes a bullet. I was caught up in theatrics and forgot whose theater this is.

Cylinder sacks of water filling the oceans, endless bullets of water, skins full of water rolling and tumbling as we came together. As though light broke us apart. As though light came with the rubble of words, though we die among the husks of remembering. It is as we knew it would be in the echoes of endless terminals, in the slow scaled guises of ourselves when we came together in the envelopes of ourselves, the bare shadow, the breath of words invisible; as slight errors repeating themselves; as degradation passes like madness through a crowd. It was not ordained. It was one drop of salt water against another.

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough! Thy winds, thy wide grey skies! Thy mists, that roll and rise! Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag And all but cry with colour!   That gaunt crag To crush!   To lift the lean of that black bluff! World, World, I cannot get thee close enough! Long have I known a glory in it all, But never knew I this; Here such a passion is As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year; My soul is all but out of me,—let fall No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

The goldfish in my bowl turns into a carp each night. Swimming in circles in the day, regal, admired by emperors, but each night, while I sleep, it turns into silver, a dagger cold and sharp, couched at one spot, enough to frighten cats. The rest of the furniture squats in the cold and dark, complains of being a lone man’s furnishings, and plots a revolt. I can hear myself snore, but not their infidelity. Sometimes I wake with a start; silently they move back into their places. I have been unpopular with myself, pacing in my small, square room. But my uncle said, “Even in a palace, you can but sleep in one room.” With this I become humble as a simple preacher, saying, “I have no powers; they emanate from God.” With this I sleep soundly, Fish or no fish, dagger or no dagger. When I wake, my fish is gold, it pleases me with a trail of bubbles. My furniture has been loyal all night, waiting to provide me comfort. There was no conspiracy against a poor man. With this I consider myself king.

Gone then risen Milk dawn gone then risen Our ephemeral fawning done Gone sanguine then risen in spell High with your wrist while nihil busy Unburrowing dice teams from sand figurines Risen to swirl steam scooping passing seemingly A kindred-ided up and up, born of dormant corners Forms filial then filled          Goes mourn and swoon Love have and love loom                    Union and risen

From a distance, at night, they seem to be industries—all lit up but not on the map; or, in this scientific age, they could be installations for launching rocket ships— so solid, and with such security, are they. . . Ah, but up close, by the light of day, we see, not “pads” but actual paddies— for these are simply silos in ricefields, structures to hold the harvested grain. Still, they're the tallest things around, and, by night or day, you'd have to say they're ample for what they do: storage. And, if you amble around from your car, you can lean up against one in the sun, feeling warmth on your cheek as you spread out your arms, holding on to the whole world around you, to the shores of other lands where the laborers launched their lives to arrive and plant and harvest this grain of history—as you hold and look, look up, up, up, and whisper: “Grandfather!”

I grow in places others can’t, where wind is high and water scant. I drink the rain, I eat the sun; before the prairie winds I run. I see, I sprout, I grow, I creep, and in the ice and snow, I sleep. On steppe or veld or pampas dry, beneath the grand, enormous sky, I make my humble, bladed bed. And where there’s level ground, I spread.

I drive past him each day in the swamp where he stands on one leg, hunched as if dreaming of his own form the surface reflects. Often I nearly forget to turn left, buy fish and wine, be home in time to cook and chill. Today the bird stays with me, as if I am moving through the heron’s dream to share his sky or water—places he will rise into on slow flapping wings or where his long bill darts to catch unwary frogs. I’ve seen his slate blue feathers lift him as dangling legs fold back, I’ve seen him fly through the dying sun and out again, entering night, entering my own sleep. I only know this bird by a name we’ve wrapped him in, and when I stand on my porch, fish in the broiler, wine glass sweating against my palm, glint of sailboats tacking home on dusky water, I try to imagine him slowly descending to his nest, wise as he was or ever will be, filling each moment with that moment’s act or silence, and the evening folds itself around me.