1630 Nature poems

So beautiful but often unseen a maid of nature the street cleaner that’s everywhere never thanked never liked always ignored so elegant in a way no one sees but without it we would be in trash up to our knees with the heart of a lion the mind of a fox the color of the night sky a crow the unpaid workman that helps in every way each and every day

Too much rain loosens trees. In the hills giant oaks fall upon their knees. You can touch parts you have no right to— places only birds should fly to.

Off go the crows from the roof. The crows can’t hold on. They might as well Be perched on an oil slick. Such an awkward dance, These gentlemen In their spottled-black coats. Such a tipsy dance, As if they didn’t know where they were. Such a humorous dance, As they try to set things right, As the wind reduces them. Such a sorrowful dance. How embarrassing is love When it goes wrong In front of everyone.

A crush of oily plant and treated white, wrapt and reached by root, sky-touched and still, a bud in leaf: make of me a body. Oil me, hand and foot, bind me tight and scented green: this is my dressing, done. Ay lived and spoke to what ay was. No matter if you answer. On hand and foot an oil and scent. Across my forehead fingers sweep a clay. Remember what ay was and am. Kind horse, lie down beside.

When the rooster jumps up on the windowsill and spreads his red-gold wings, I wake, thinking it is the sun and call Juanita, hearing her answer, but only in my mind. I know she is already outside, breaking the cane off at ground level, using only her big hands. I get the machete and walk among the cane, until I see her, lying face-down in the dirt. Juanita, dead in the morning like this. I raise the machete— what I take from the earth, I give back— and cut off her feet. I lift the body and carry it to the wagon, where I load the cane to sell in the village. Whoever tastes my woman in his candy, his cake, tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane; it is grief. If you eat too much of it, you want more, you can never get enough.

Inside I brought willows, the tips bursting, blue iris (I forget the legend of long life they represent) and the branch of pepper tree whose pink seeds lack the passion of most fruit. On my hands a perfume of pepper. Outside the rain walks. There were two. Their posture taken out of the wall- paper (a ghost story) Jack talked.    His determined privacy against my public face.     The poem by dictation.      A disturbance in the cone of weather. Neither of these is not making.     The comic is a matter of style as yellow hands mark the worker. The clown of dignity sits in a tree. The clown of games hangs there too. Which is which or where they go— the point is to make others see that two men in a tree is clearly the same thing as poetry.

There is no salutation.     The harvesters with gunny sacks bend picking up jade stones. (Sure that Amor would appear in sleep.     Director.    Guide.) Secret borrowings fit into their hands. Cold on the tongue. White flecks on the water. These jade pebbles are true green when wet. On the seventh night, the branches parted. The other replied, How photographic.      Amor doesn’t appear on demand.   He’s more like a snake skin. If he fits, he lets you in or sheds your body against the rocks. I slept in a fort. My bed pushed up against the log enclosure.    At 3:00 his ankles pressed against each side of my head. When I woke crying for help he rose near the kitchen door dressed as a hunter. The other replied, Amor born like a cup trembles at the lip.   Superstitions fit into your hands. Thou has returned to thy house. The other replied, Torn loose from the eaves, the blood trembles at the lips. Nine fetters on thy feet Nine crossings of the street Nine suppers where they meet Nine words of loss repeat this and that Nine hunters cross the field Nine lovers yield their right of way Two came fighting out of the dark.

There is a difference it used to make, seeing three swans in this versus four in that quadrant of sky. I am not imagining. It was very large, as its effects were. Declarations of war, the timing fixed upon for a sea- departure; or, about love, a sudden decision not to, to pretend instead to a kind of choice. It was dramatic, as it should be. Without drama, what is ritual? I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere to be found. They come to me like strays, like the damaged, something that could know better, and should, therefore—but does not: a form of faith, you've said. I call it sacrifice—an instinct for it, or a habit at first, that becomes required, the way art can become, eventually, all we have of what was true. You shouldn't look at me like that. Like one of those saints on whom the birds once settled freely.

Here, on fine long legs springy as steel, a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill that skims along over the basement floor wrapped up in a simple obsession. Eight legs reach out like the master ribs of a web in which some thought is caught dead center in its own small world, a thought so far from the touch of things that we can only guess at it. If mine, it would be the secret dream of walking alone across the floor of my life with an easy grace, and with love enough to live on at the center of myself.

The damselfly folds its wings over its body when at rest. Captured, it should not be killed in cyanide, but allowed to die slowly: then the colors, especially the reds and blues, will last. In the hand it crushes easily into a rosy slime. Its powers of flight are weak. The trout feeds on the living damselfly. The trout leaps up from the water, and if there is sun you see the briefest shiver of gold, and then the river again. When the trout dies it turns its white belly to the mirror of the sky. The heron fishes for the trout in the gravelly shallows on the far side of the stream. The heron is the exact blue of the shadows the sun makes of trees on water. When you hold the heron most clearly in your eye, you are least certain it is there. When the blue heron dies, it lies beyond reach on the far side of the river.