1630 Nature poems

Dusk to dawn, sleek skunks enjoy avocados in my yard. I give wide berth. Before the first jogger leaves her prints on pavement, tough raccoons appear. They pretend they don’t hear my keys click but they peek to make sure it’s me. Foxes play hide-and-seek, sometimes on our lawn, other times across the street, but never after seven; and brazen squirrels eye me from the center of the street, dare me to approach. Will this be a day for Catalina eddies, clouds stacked, catching like magnets in a liquid air swirl? Or will it blow a fierce Santa Ana, days of fires in the hills, smoldering chaparral, winds so fierce birds do low-crawls? I cast a spell for Santa Anas the shallow coast a censer mixed with black sage, Torrey Pine, Engelmann oak—precious oils to fumigate the San Diego skies, the annual burning pulse.

"How does the water Come down at Lodore?" My little boy asked me Thus, once on a time; And moreover he tasked me To tell him in rhyme. Anon, at the word, There first came one daughter, And then came another, To second and third The request of their brother, And to hear how the water Comes down at Lodore, With its rush and its roar, As many a time They had seen it before. So I told them in rhyme, For of rhymes I had store; And 'twas in my vocation For their recreation That so I should sing; Because I was Laureate To them and the King. From its sources which well In the tarn on the fell; From its fountains In the mountains, Its rills and its gills; Through moss and through brake, It runs and it creeps For a while, till it sleeps In its own little lake. And thence at departing, Awakening and starting, It runs through the reeds, And away it proceeds, Through meadow and glade, In sun and in shade, And through the wood-shelter, Among crags in its flurry, Helter-skelter, Hurry-skurry. Here it comes sparkling, And there it lies darkling; Now smoking and frothing Its tumult and wrath in, Till, in this rapid race On which it is bent, It reaches the place Of its steep descent. The cataract strong Then plunges along, Striking and raging As if a war raging Its caverns and rocks among; Rising and leaping, Sinking and creeping, Swelling and sweeping, Showering and springing, Flying and flinging, Writhing and ringing, Eddying and whisking, Spouting and frisking, Turning and twisting, Around and around With endless rebound: Smiting and fighting, A sight to delight in; Confounding, astounding, Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound. Collecting, projecting, Receding and speeding, And shocking and rocking, And darting and parting, And threading and spreading, And whizzing and hissing, And dripping and skipping, And hitting and splitting, And shining and twining, And rattling and battling, And shaking and quaking, And pouring and roaring, And waving and raving, And tossing and crossing, And flowing and going, And running and stunning, And foaming and roaming, And dinning and spinning, And dropping and hopping, And working and jerking, And guggling and struggling, And heaving and cleaving, And moaning and groaning; And glittering and frittering, And gathering and feathering, And whitening and brightening, And quivering and shivering, And hurrying and skurrying, And thundering and floundering; Dividing and gliding and sliding, And falling and brawling and sprawling, And driving and riving and striving, And sprinkling and twinkling and wrinkling, And sounding and bounding and rounding, And bubbling and troubling and doubling, And grumbling and rumbling and tumbling, And clattering and battering and shattering; Retreating and beating and meeting and sheeting, Delaying and straying and playing and spraying, Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing, Recoiling, turmoiling and toiling and boiling, And gleaming and streaming and steaming and beaming, And rushing and flushing and brushing and gushing, And flapping and rapping and clapping and slapping, And curling and whirling and purling and twirling, And thumping and plumping and bumping and jumping, And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing; And so never ending, but always descending, Sounds and motions for ever and ever are blending All at once and all o'er, with a mighty uproar, - And this way the water comes down at Lodore.

They came like dewdrops overnight Eating every plant in sight, Those nasty worms with legs that crawl So creepy up the garden wall, Green prickly fuzz to hurt and sting Each unsuspecting living thing. How I hate them!   Oh, you know I’d love to squish them with my toe. But then I see past their disguise, Someday they’ll all be butterflies.

The spider living in the bike seat has finally spun its own spokes through the wheels. I have seen it crawl upside down, armored black and jigging back to the hollow frame, have felt the stickiness break as the tire pulls free the stitches of last night’s sewing. We’ve ridden this bike together for a week now, two legs in gyre by daylight, and at night, the eight converting gears into looms, handle bars into sails. This is how it is to be part of a cycle— to be always in motion, and to be always woven to something else.

A striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille Is, you may say, a patroness of boughs Too queenly kind toward nature to be kin. But ceremony never did conceal, Save to the silly eye, which all allows, How much we are the woods we wander in. Let her be some Sabrina fresh from stream, Lucent as shallows slowed by wading sun, Bedded on fern, the flowers’ cynosure: Then nymph and wood must nod and strive to dream That she is airy earth, the trees, undone, Must ape her languor natural and pure. Ho-hum. I am for wit and wakefulness, And love this feigning lady by Bazille. What's lightly hid is deepest understood, And when with social smile and formal dress She teaches leaves to curtsey and quadrille, I think there are most tigers in the wood.

We feel the volt inside our veins, inside the vines, inside the rain, and through the capillaries of a tree. We feel the pulse above in storms, vibrato of thunder, the whispering rhythms of a river, magnetic currents in the earth, the alternating flow of breath, the push of tides, reversing air from caves, dilating hum and dance of bees, the chant of auctioneer. All oscillate together, or they seem to, in this play of chance, beneath the stars' indifference.

Like the waxwings in the juniper, a dozen at a time, divided, paired, passing the berries back and forth, and by nightfall, wobbling, piping, wounded with joy. Or a party of redwings grazing what falls—blossom and seed, nutmeat and fruit— made light in the head and cut by the light, swept from the ground, carried downwind, taken.... It's called wing-rowing, the wing-burdened arms unbending, yielding, striking a balance, walking the white invisible line drawn just ahead in the air, first sign the slur, the liquid notes too liquid, the heart in the mouth melodious, too close, which starts the chanting, the crooning, the long lyric silences, the song of our undoing. It's called side-step, head-forward, raised-crown, flap- and-glide-flight aggression, though courtship is the object, affection the compulsion, love the overspill—the body nodding, still standing, ready to fly straight out of itself—or its bill-tilt, wing-flash, topple- over; wing-droop, bowing, tail-flick and drift; back-ruffle, wingspread, quiver and soar. Someone is troubled, someone is trying, in earnest, to explain; to speak without swallowing the tongue; to find the perfect word among so few or the too many— to sing like the thrush from the deepest part of the understory, territorial, carnal, thorn-at-the-throat, or flutelike in order to make one sobering sound. Sound of the breath blown over the bottle, sound of the reveler home at dawn, light of the sun a warbler yellow, the sun in song-flight, lopsided-pose. Be of good-cheer, my father says, lifting his glass to greet a morning in which he's awake to be with the birds: or up all night in the sleep of the world, alive again, singing.

‘I have always felt that desolation, that hell itself, is most powerfully expressed in an uninhabited natural landscape at its bleakest.’ —Anthony Hecht 1. To each his own hell. Mine was an uninhabited landscape as far from nature as you can get without actually leaving the planet, a man-made moon waste on Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn, fired in the sun’s kiln through unending afternoons when I was nine or ten. I can never get the whole scene put together in my head, thanks to whatever guardian spirit flags down potentially dangerous intruders on the verge of memory, but parts of me hold parts of it: my ears play out the hissing wires’ repeated rise and fall, dry waves breaking above pavement; my nostrils chafe where fumes of gasoline weep from soft tarred patches in the asphalt; through a chainlink grid, my eyes take in some lot’s trapped beach, its black sand an amalgam of gravel, soot, and broken glass; or they blink in sequence with the traffic light’s perpetual solitaire at a carless intersection, flicking over greens, ambers, reds; my hands remember enough not to touch the shut steel trap doors of delivery chutes where air trembles over surfaces as at their beginnings in a furnace. What fills my mind to bursting is emptiness, the spirit of inverted Genesis transforming light and water’s urge towards fullness into a miracle of unearthly loss. 2. Sentries, a pair of gasoline pumps napped. Their rubber arms dangled groundwards and looped back up, hanging slack from the brass lapel their trigger-fingers hooked at shoulder height. They were no angels, but kept the gate of hell whenever I made visits to the angels. Behind them, next to a roll-up garage door always rolled up, with an invisible car always risen above the stone lintel on the hydraulic lift, a soft drink cooler sat coffin-like against the stucco wall. And always songs from a hidden radio promised cool mountain rivers to the hot flat city: somebody else must have listened, but I never saw a soul in all my visits. The angels’ wings fluttered the moment I raised the lid, a potent shimmer, as if the sun itself shone from the chest, not its reflections playing off the steel bars and icy waters. The angels sat in rows between the bars, their orders chevroned by the shapes and colours of their glass capes: the bluish, scalloped whorl of cherubim, the powers’ straight sheer crystal, the emerald flare of flaming seraphim— all emissaries from the sky-washed shore of heaven. To put a coin in the dispenser, slide one of them along its plated channel and lift it free through the chest’s narrow gate— to kiss the cold stars of its distillation— was not important; it was only important to see the angels swimming in the glitter and dip my fingers in their flickering water at the centre of that man-made desert, knowing that they were man-made, and might shatter.

Welcome to Texas, Devin Johnston, a windmill has your name— stubborn and American at off-rhyme to the arroyo-creased, angular region. Bald, redheaded turkey buzzards eat a rabbit struck by what it only understood as supernatural. The birds bring to mind black grasshoppers that broke clacking into red-winged and rasping darts. And even as we drive secular sunlight polishes aluminum slantwise.

The Crow call this time of year the Black Cherry Moon when the rose hips are blood-bright, spattered on their overwrought stems, and the creek calls so clearly in words almost our own as we come sliding down the bank. Last night, we covered the gardens in plastic. The chickadees were back after their wide diet of summer. We ate the last trout, its spine curved from disease. So much can go wrong, I want to know what you will promise me as our hands reach in and in through the copper, the carmine leaves. I know you are lonely, alone with your grief for your parents who are not my parents, for your life, which, despite all, is not my life. The cherries are thick here, hanging in clusters, purple-black from frost. It started to rain and I am chilled by it. Each day, we promise, we will talk of our fears of intimacy, how we still expect to be hurt when we love. You bring me a coat from the back of the truck, but I want to stop our task now, to sit in the cab of the truck while the gray spills, slick with thunder. What if I kissed you there in depth. After so many years, I can misunderstand the difference between instinct and obligation, how my hand continues to grasp the stems. Keats said poems should come easy as leaves off the trees, but see how they cling and wrestle with their ties. And now, the sun shines. It is not this grace I had imagined. When Keats said poems, I meant love. The chokecherries roll easily into my palm, then fall into the plastic bag that binds my writs. Over and over, until we have enough, until our fingers are bruised with their dark juices.