1630 Nature poems

Their eggs are laid on lupine. Tiny jade hairstreaks I could easily mistake for dew. Too precious. Too incidental, and besides that, blue, these trills that flounce in my potato patch, drawn from dryland origins to the domestic stain of water from my hose. What an old woman would study, I think as you hand me the guidebook, distracted by the replica of a parasol growing out of a bleached cow pie. The Siamese kitten with his butterfly eyes comes running, his mouth full of swallowtail, his breath smelling of borax and sugar I have poured over the ant hills in the garden. He is young and intent on eating poison. We bushwhack through Paradise, what is there to say except to lament the daily evidence of its passing. How the common blues scatter from my shade. And you, so fragile, so sick, so thin, your diet restricted, keep pointing out the bearded face of larkspur. When the angels fell, a fifteenth-centruy bishop says, there were 133, 306, 668 of them. It takes us all afternoon to cross the field. The body, it is so sad what happens to it. If you fell, you would dry up instantly. But these are not angel wings who disguise themselves as leaf or shred of bark, who are named after the stops in meaning our language must make room for: the comma whose wings look battered, or the violet underside of the question mark. To keep the mind from clenching, you say, is the main thing. Even the most beautiful days always seem to have death in them. As Valentinus said; our fall into love and sleep. You especially like the dark alpines with their furred bodies and lack of marking. And the sulphurs, yellowed scraps that fall from a myth of origin that doesn’t include us. When we find them, we will wonder who is still alive. We speak of our souls with such surface ease. But who will take such care for us? You bend and bend to the scrappy blue sea, your back turned to the moon fluttering above you. I have been thinking so much of strength this week, yours and mine, I mean, the field of attention that can be strengthened.

There is magic in decay. A dance to be done For the rotting, the maggot strewn Piles of flesh which pile Upon the dung-ridden earth And the damp that gathers And rusts and defiles. There is a bit of this In even the most zoetic soul — The dancing child’s arms Flailing to an old ska song Conduct the day-old flies Away to whatever rank Native is closest. Just today I was walking along the river With my daughter in my backpack And I opened my email On my phone and Duffie Had sent me a poem Called “Compost.” I read it To my little girl and started To explain before I was three Words in Selma started Yelling, Daddy, Daddy, snake! In the path was a snake, Belly up and still nerve-twitching The ghost of some passing Bicycle or horse. Pretty, Selma said. Yes, I said. And underneath my yes Another yes, the yes to my body, Just beginning to show signs Of slack, and another, my grasping In the dark for affirming flesh That in turn says yes, yes Let’s rot together but not until We’ve drained what sap Is left in these trees. And I wake in the morning And think of the coroner Calling to ask what color My father’s eyes were, And I asked, Why? Why can’t You just look — and the coroner, Matter-of-factly says, Decay. Do you want some eggs, my love? I have a new way of preparing them. And look, look outside, I think this weather Has the chance of holding.

I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare? Hunger quivers on a fleshly string at the crossroad. So deep is the lore, there’s only tomorrow today where darkness splinters & wounds the bird of paradise. On paths that plunge into primordial green, Echo’s laughter finds us together. In the sweatshops of desire men think if they don’t die the moon won’t rise. All the dead-end streets run into one moment of bliss & sleight of hand. Beside the Euphrates, past the Tigris, up the Mississippi. Bloodline & clockwork. The X drawn where we stand. Trains follow rivers that curve around us. The distant night opens like a pearl fan, a skirt, a heart, a drop of salt. When we embrace, we are not an island beyond fables & the blue exhaust of commerce. When the sounds of River Styx punish trees, my effigy speaks to the night owl. Our voices break open the pink magnolia where struggle is home to the beast in us. All the senses tuned for the Hawkesbury, labyrinths turning into lowland fog. Hand in hand, feeling good, we walk phantoms from the floating machine. When a drowning man calls out, his voice follows him downstream.

One fisherman alongside the other one seagull alongside the other seagulls over the fishermen.

The snail pushes through a green night, for the grass is heavy with water and meets over the bright path he makes, where rain has darkened the earth’s dark. He moves in a wood of desire, pale antlers barely stirring as he hunts. I cannot tell what power is at work, drenched there with purpose, knowing nothing. What is a snail’s fury? All I think is that if later I parted the blades above the tunnel and saw the thin trail of broken white across litter, I would never have imagined the slow passion to that deliberate progress.

You take a rock, your hand is hard. You raise your eyes, and there's a pair of small beloveds, caught in pails. The monocle and eyepatch correspond. You take a glove, your hand is soft. The ocean floor was done in lizardskin. Around a log or snag the surface currents run like lumber about a knot. A boat is bent to sea—we favor the medium we're in, our shape's around us. It takes time. At night, the bed alive, what teller of truth could tell the two apart? Lover, beloved, hope is command. Your hand is given, when you take a hand.

The jungle, from the floor to the canopy, Clogs and entwines Its every rung and level with rank growth. The python dines Among an epiphytic gaudery And hungry vines. On the mizzled hair of the two-toed sloth Moss has designs. Yet all that climbing tonnage is content-free. The top limbs sway as though to write in air, But can’t remember what they scribble there. Through the savanna’s heat-glaze the herds pause, Ripple and shiver, Or graze hypnotically, or drop their young, Which may deliver Their wet thin steps into the lion’s jaws. By pool or river They stoop at evening side by side among The surface quiver Of their reflexions as the light withdraws: A fable set down in invisible ink; They print their shadows on the pool they drink. Even the perfect pictures in the shale’s Slow-motion traps, The filamentous feathers, which one or two Sharp hammer taps Release, the fish in their meticulous scales, The precise maps Of leaves, did not direct this rendezvous. They’re simply gaps In time, and have no part in these details. The weird wiwaxias, worms and arthropods Were empty of intention as stone gods. Once, though, a figure had the thought to crawl Out of the day Into a cave’s dark reach, its first invoker, And there to splay His hand against the tallow-glimmered wall, And pause to spray His mouth’s cargo of spittle and red ochre On the array Of his five fingers, clear, indelible: Author and content of the space displayed, The maker’s hand becoming what it made.

had no direction to go but up: and this, the shattery road its surface graining, trickle in late thaw—is nothing amiss? —this melt, the sign assures us,natural cycle and whoosh, the water a dream of forgotten white past aspens colored in sulfur, they trembled, would —poor sinners in redemption song—shed their tainted leaves I tell you what boy I was, writing lyrics to reflect my passions: the smell of a bare neck in summer a thin trail of hairs disappearing below the top button of cut-offs the lean, arched back of a cyclist straining to ascend a hill in the starlight I wandered: streets no better than fields the cul-de-sacs of suburbia just as treacherous, just as empty if wood doves sang in the branches of the acacias, I could not hear them anyone lost in that same night was lost in another tract the air pulsed and dandelion pollen blew from green stalks —that was all and yes, someone took me in his car.   and another against the low fence in the park at the end of our block.   under the willow branches where gnats made a furious cloud at dawn and chased us away I knew how it felt to lie in a patch of marigolds: golden stains the way morning swarmed a hidden rooftop, the catbirds singing the feel of ruin upon lips rubbed raw throughout the night granite peaks: here, the earth has asserted itself. and the ice asserted and human intimacies conspired to keep us low and apart for an ice age I knew you only as an idea of longing: a voice in the next yard, whispering through the chink a vagabond outlined against the sky, among the drying grass we journey this day to darkness: the chasm walls lift us on their scaly backs the glaciers relinquish their secrets: that sound is the ice bowing and the sound underneath, the trickle: the past released, disappearing you pinnacle of my life, stand with me on this brink half-clouded basin caked in flat grays, the very demise of green you have surmounted the craggy boundary between us. you open a place for me in earth, receiving my song —for Haines Eason

Through the bedroom window a February sunrise, fog suspended between pines. Intricate crystals— hoarfrost lace on a cherry tree. My son calls out, awake. We sway, blanket-wrapped, his head nuzzling my neck. Hoarfrost, tree—I point, shaping each word. Favorable conditions: a toddler’s brain, hard data-mining, a system’s approach. Hoar, he hears. His hand reaches to the wallpaper lion. Phenomena converge: warmth, humidity, temperature’s sudden plunge; a child’s brain, objects, sound. Eyes widening, he opens his mouth and roars.

A heave of afternoon light pulls a tulip from the turf, a bower for locusts, a cup of shells. The farmhouse tilts, a bent shadow on wheels. In cedar rooms a family is molded, silent, wrapped in the wire of steel eyes and stopped voice, romantic ash. This is not my house, my ghost, my uninvited guest, my lost labor of love, my thicket or grease, my JPEG gessoed or rawhide suit. The yellow light throbs like an internal organ — soft body of an overture to insect sounds — sapling of a new world — whose future awaits me at the tilting window of my own domestic hut. Perhaps this is my mesh of hours, my muscular ache, my guardian sash, twist of rope carved around an old maple trunk, my rod of power red with anticipatory friction at the edge of an emerging set of planetary rings. Stained ochre by the air I pitch forward, a vanilla-scented pear that floats or falls. In the rattan chair on the front porch by the blistered boards of the front door a figure of tar watches. Cool dust sparkles and settles. Shadows have made me visible. An empty wagon flares on the hillside.