1630 Nature poems

Here is where You can get nowhere Faster than ever As you go under Deeper and deeper In the fertile smother Of another acre Like any other You can’t peer over And then another And everywhere You veer or hare There you are Farther and farther Afield than before But on you blunder In the verdant meander As if   the answer To looking for cover Were to bewilder Your inner minotaur And near and far were Neither here nor there And where you are Is where you were

She says my hair smells like corn tortillas. I raise an eyebrow. After all those honeysuckle and papaya shampoos, I can’t believe my scalp hasn’t soaked up the scent of blossom or the perfume of rainfall. No, she’s my mother, and she insists that even as a little girl, my whole bedroom breathed corn tortillas. Pressing nose to pillowcase, I search for masa, reach back before molcajete and plow to a dusky meadow, its bed of soil flecked with teosinte, ancestor grasses. Up through the dark follicles of my skull covered in sun-cracked husks, push the black-brown silk strands, cocooning thirsty kernels. Maíz sprouts into fields of thought bearing hybrid rows of words that fall like teeth from the mouths of the dead.

A levitating anvil. Omen of seagull blown inland. Ranch gate said Riverstyx, but it was the woodland that looked lethal: no place to put down your foot. Bucolics demand boustrophedon. The by-the-book. “The male cicadas thrummed their stomachs while a dragonfly eyed us from a pole hook. Ripening grapefruit. Us just under. Shoulder to shoulder. Tree-shook.” Milky skies belied the baffled thunder ... They left, not footsteps,trails in uncut grass. “Like parallel snakes. No wonder.” Eurydice should have thought moccasins, aka cottonmouths, apropos stealth. Distilled to systole-diastole. Assassins. And everywhere sharp palmettos clacked their tongues in homage to language — “I should have rhymed them with stilettos.” Why would E. shed her red wedge with its Mary Jane band, wetland mosquito and midge circling ankle (punctuated, understand, by the awl, to mimic ellipses ... )? “Because” — O. — “she mimicked the shy strand of epiphyte — Spanish moss — goose-pimpling the languid pond with its dependent clause.”

Absorbed in planting bulbs, that work of hope, I was startled by a loud human voice, “Do go on working while I talk. Don’t stop!” And I was caught upon the difficult choice— To yield the last half hour of precious light, Or to stay on my knees, absurd and rude; I willed her to be gone with all my might, This kindly neighbor who destroyed a mood; I could not think of next spring any more, I had to re-assess the way I live. Long after I went in and closed the door, I pondered on the crude imperative. What it is to be caught up in each day Like a child fighting imaginary wars, Converting work into this passionate play, A rounded whole made up of different chores Which one might name haphazard meditation. And yet an unexpected call destroys Or puts to rout my primitive elation: Why be so serious about mere joys? Is this where some outmoded madness lies, Poet as recluse? No, what comes to me Is how my father looked out of his eyes, And how he fought for his own passionate play. He could tear up unread and throw away Communications from officialdom, And, courteous in every other way, Would not brook anything that kept him from Those lively dialogues with man’s whole past That were his intimate and fruitful pleasure. Impetuous, impatient to the last, “Be adamant, keep clear, strike for your treasure!” I hear the youthful ardor in his voice (And so I must forgive a self in labor). I feel his unrepentant smiling choice, (And so I ask forgiveness of my neighbor).

Now the rich cherry, whose sleek wood, And top with silver petals traced Like a strict box its gems encased, Has spilt from out that cunning lid, All in an innocent green round, Those melting rubies which it hid; With moss ripe-strawberry-encrusted, So birds get half, and minds lapse merry To taste that deep-red, lark’s-bite berry, And blackcap bloom is yellow-dusted. The wren that thieved it in the eaves A trailer of the rose could catch To her poor droopy sloven thatch, And side by side with the wren’s brood— O lovely time of beggar’s luck— Opens the quaint and hairy bud; And full and golden is the yield Of cows that never have to house, But all night nibble under boughs, Or cool their sides in the moist field. Into the rooms flow meadow airs, The warm farm baking smell’s blown round. Inside and out, and sky and ground Are much the same; the wishing star, Hesperus, kind and early born, Is risen only finger-far; All stars stand close in summer air, And tremble, and look mild as amber; When wicks are lighted in the chamber, They are like stars which settled there. Now straightening from the flowery hay, Down the still light the mowers look, Or turn, because their dreaming shook, And they waked half to other days, When left alone in the yellow stubble The rusty-coated mare would graze. Yet thick the lazy dreams are born, Another thought can come to mind, But like the shivering of the wind, Morning and evening in the corn.

It is an afternoon toward the end of August: Autumnal weather, cool following on, And riding in, after the heat of summer, Into the empty afternoon shade and light, The shade full of light without any thickness at all; You can see right through and right down into the depth Of the light and shade of the afternoon; there isn’t Any weight of the summer pressing down. In the backyard of the house next door there’s a kid, Maybe eleven or twelve, and a young man, Visitors at the house whom I don’t know, The house in which the sound of some kind of party, Perhaps even a wedding, is going on. Somehow you can tell from the tone of their voices That they don’t know each other very well— Two guests at the party, one of them, maybe, A friend of the bride or groom, the other the son Or the younger brother, maybe, of somebody there. A couple of blocks away the wash of traffic Dimly sounds, as if we were near the ocean. They’re shooting baskets, amiably and mildly. The noise of the basketball, though startlingly louder Than the voices of the two of them as they play, Is peaceable as can be, something like meter. The earnest voice of the kid, girlish and manly, And the voice of the young man, carefully playing the game Of having a grown-up conversation with him: I can tell the young man is teaching the boy by example, The easy way he dribbles the ball and passes it Back with a single gesture of wrist to make it Easy for the kid to be in synch; Giving and taking, perfectly understood.

I call my wife outdoors to have her listen, to turn her ears upward, beyond the cloud-veiled sky where the moon dances thin light, to tell her, “Don’t hear the cars on the freeway— it’s not the truck-rumble. It is and is not the sirens.” She stands there, on deck a rocking boat, wanting to please the captain who would have her hear the inaudible. Her eyes, so blue the day sky is envious, fix blackly on me, her mouth poised on question like a stone. But, she hears, after all. January on the Gulf, warm wind washing over us, we stand chilled in the winter of those voices.

Born again on a Monday under a broken zodiac. My father the woodman, a surgeon among snags, could read the living trail of blades rebounding in the field, the mopped-matte passage through the dew. He woke a brush pile with fire throwing shadows on the child, I was thrown over. Father, it was a pleasure to meet you on this luminous route between two lives. In this impromptu pool reaped from rain where mosquitos multiply. Though survival, I’m told, is impersonal and without teleological purpose. Malaria is just trying to maximize its own fitness as are the corporations who, for palm oil set the peatlands ablaze and drained the water table. Dense haze from the sea choked the light from day suffused our mountain in a numinous red corona. And as for the getting over there will be no ascension, no circumambulation, there is only going through. We must go through it.

I suppose I shan’t go fishing Pa, for fear of finding We’re no fishers, Our folk, for all our bent For fish scraps and our Tolerance for muck dwellers and the like. This creek is like no other, Pa, Inky cold and familiar, Don’t drink from it, it Commands, don’t kneel, don’t stare down Or wash in it, don't pry your shoes from off Your battered stubs, not yet, no jay Flashes past and asks how you mean To ask a shit creek to provide. You exist. It would, too. It falls through These viney half-corrupted patches of nettled hickory and oak Into a muddy slough Into a culvert, splitting Around the treatment plant Then joining itself back in a ramrod concrete Channel beneath pavement; Then into the lake, sludge, great Lake. Do you follow? It’s taking you somewhere, it matters Not where, Pa, it’s a trip At your command, inaudible. It’s the postponed one We would have scheduled in these winding down days Together had we not been What we made of us. In the stagnant north woods. In the pale thick end-of-knowing daylight.

It begins in a cow lane with bees and white clover, courses along corn, rushes accelerando against rocks. It rises to a teetering pitch as I cross a shaky tree-bridge, syncopates a riff over the dissonance of trash—derelict icebox with a missing door, mohair loveseat sinking into thistle. It winds through green adder’s mouth, faint as the bells of Holsteins heading home. Blue shadows lengthen, but the undertow of a harmony pulls me on through raspy Joe-pye-weed and staccato-barbed fence. It hums in a culvert beneath cars, then empties into a river that flows oboe-deep past Indian dance ground, waterwheel and town, past the bleached stones in the churchyard, the darkening hill.