1630 Nature poems

(Kamo-no-Chomei, born at Kamo 1154, died at Toyama on Mount Hino, 24th June 1216) Swirl sleeping in the waterfall! On motionless pools scum appearing disappearing! Eaves formal on the zenith, lofty city Kyoto, wealthy, without antiquities! Housebreakers clamber about, builders raising floor upon floor at the corner sites, replacing gardens by bungalows. In the town where I was known the young men stare at me. A few faces I know remain. Whence comes man at his birth? or where does death lead him? Whom do you mourn? Whose steps wake your delight? Dewy hibiscus dries: though dew outlast the petals. I have been noting events forty years. On the twentyseventh May eleven hundred and seventyseven, eight p.m., fire broke out at the corner of Tomi and Higuchi streets. In a night palace, ministries, university, parliament were destroyed. As the wind veered flames spread out in the shape of an open fan. Tongues torn by gusts stretched and leapt. In the sky clouds of cinders lit red with the blaze. Some choked, some burned, some barely escaped. Sixteen great officials lost houses and very many poor. A third of the city burned; several thousands died; and of beasts, limitless numbers. Men are fools to invest in real estate. Three years less three days later a wind starting near the outer boulevard broke a path a quarter mile across to Sixth Avenue. Not a house stood. Some were felled whole, some in splinters; some had left great beams upright in the ground and round about lay rooves scattered where the wind flung them. Flocks of furniture in the air, everything flat fluttered like dead leaves. A dust like fog or smoke, you could hear nothing for the roar, bufera infernal! Lamed some, wounded some. This cyclone turned southwest. Massacre without cause. Portent? The same year thunderbolted change of capital, fixed here, Kyoto, for ages. Nothing compelled the change nor was it an easy matter but the grumbling was disproportionate. We moved, those with jobs or wanting jobs or hangers on of the rest, in haste haste fretting to be the first. Rooftrees overhanging empty rooms; dismounted: floating down the river. The soil returned to heath. I visited the new site narrow and too uneven, cliffs and marshes, deafening shores, perpetual strong winds; the palace a logcabin dumped amongst the hills (yet not altogether inelegant). There was no flat place for houses, many vacant lots, the former capital wrecked, the new a camp, and thoughts like clouds changing, frayed by a breath: peasants bewailing lost land, newcomers aghast at prices. No one in uniform: the crowds resembled demobilized conscripts. There were murmurs. Time defined them. In the winter the decree was rescinded, we returned to Kyoto; but the houses were gone and none could afford to rebuild them. I have heard of a time when kings beneath bark rooves watched chimneys. When smoke was scarce, taxes were remitted. To appreciate present conditions collate them with those of antiquity. Drought, floods, and a dearth. Two fruitless autumns. Empty markets, swarms of beggars. Jewels sold for a handful of rice. Dead stank on the curb, lay so thick on Riverside Drive a car couldnt pass. The pest bred. That winter my fuel was the walls of my own house. Fathers fed their children and died, babies died sucking the dead. The priest Hoshi went about marking their foreheads A, Amida, their requiem; he counted them in the East End in the last two months, fortythree thousand A’s. Crack, rush, ye mountains, bury your rills! Spread your green glass, ocean, over the meadows! Scream, avalanche, boulders amok, strangle the dale! O ships in the sea’s power, O horses On shifting roads, in the earth’s power, without hoofhold! This is the earthquake, this was the great earthquake of Genryaku! The chapel fell, the abbey, the minster and the small shrines fell, their dust rose and a thunder of houses falling. O to be birds and fly or dragons and ride on a cloud! The earthquake, the great earthquake of Genryaku! A child building a mud house against a high wall: I saw him crushed suddenly, his eyes hung from their orbits like two tassels. His father howled shamelessly—an officer. I was not abashed at his crying. Such shocks continued three weeks; then lessening, but still a score daily as big as an average earthquake; then fewer, alternate days, a tertian ague of tremors. There is no record of any greater. It caused a religious revival. Months ... Years ... ........... Nobody mentions it now. This is the unstable world and we in it unstable and our houses. A poor man living amongst the rich gives no rowdy parties, doesnt sing. Dare he keep his child at home, keep a dog? He dare not pity himself above a whimper. But he visits, he flatters, he is put in his place, he remembers the patch on his trousers. His wife and sons despise him for being poor. He has no peace. If he lives in an alley of rotting frame houses he dreads a fire. If he commutes he loses his time and leaves his house daily to be plundered by gunmen. The bureaucrats are avaricious. He who has no relatives in the Inland Revenue, poor devil! Whoever helps him enslaves him and follows him crying out:Gratitude! If he wants success he is wretched. If he doesnt he passes for mad. Where shall I settle, what trade choose that the mind may practise, the body rest? My grandmother left me a house but I was always away for my health and because I was alone there. When I was thirty I couldnt stand it any longer, I built a house to suit myself: one bamboo room, you would have thought it a cartshed, poor shelter from snow or wind. It stood on the flood plain. And that quarter is also flooded with gangsters. One generation I saddened myself with idealistic philosophies, but before I was fifty I perceived there was no time to lose, left home and conversation. Among the cloudy mountains of Ohara spring and autumn, spring and autumn, spring and autumn, emptier than ever. The dew evaporates from my sixty years, I have built my last house, or hovel, a hunter’s bivouac, an old silkworm’s cocoon: ten feet by ten, seven high: and I, reckoning it a lodging not a dwelling, omitted the usual foundation ceremony. I have filled the frames with clay, set hinges at the corners; easy to take it down and carry it away when I get bored with this place. Two barrowloads of junk and the cost of a man to shove the barrow, no trouble at all. Since I have trodden Hino mountain noon has beaten through the awning over my bamboo balcony, evening shone on Amida. I have shelved my books above the window, lute and mandolin near at hand, piled bracken and a little straw for bedding, a smooth desk where the light falls, stove for bramblewood. I have gathered stones, fitted stones for a cistern, laid bamboo pipes. No woodstack, wood enough in the thicket. Toyama, snug in the creepers! Toyama, deep in the dense gully, open westward whence the dead ride out of Eden squatting on blue clouds of wistaria. (Its scent drifts west to Amida.) Summer? Cuckoo’s Follow, follow—to harvest Purgatory hill! Fall? The nightgrasshopper will shrill Fickle life! Snow will thicken on the doorstep, melt like a drift of sins. No friend to break silence, no one will be shocked if I neglect the rite. There’s a Lent of commandments kept where there’s no way to break them. A ripple of white water after a boat, shining water after the boats Mansami saw rowing at daybreak at Okinoya. Between the maple leaf and the caneflower murmurs the afternoon—Po Lo-tien saying goodbye on the verge of Jinyo river. (I am playing scales on my mandolin.) Be limber, my fingers, I am going to play Autumn Wind to the pines, I am going to play Hastening Brook to the water. I am no player but there’s nobody listening, I do it for my own amusement. Sixteen and sixty, I and the gamekeeper’s boy, one zest and equal, chewing tsubana buds, one zest and equal, persimmon, pricklypear, ears of sweetcorn pilfered from Valley Farm. The view from the summit: sky bent over Kyoto, picnic villages, Fushimi and Toba: a very economical way of enjoying yourself. Thought runs along the crest, climbs Sumiyama; beyond Kasatori it visits the great church, goes on pilgrimage to Ishiyama (no need to foot it!) or the graves of poets, of Semimaru who said: Somehow or other we scuttle through a lifetime. Somehow or other neither palace nor straw-hut is quite satisfactory.

were lifted over the valley, its steepling dustdevils the redwinged blackbirds convened vibrant arc their swift, their dive against the filmy, the finite air the profession of absence, of being absented, a lifting skyward then gone the moment of flight: another resignation from the sweep of earth jackrabbit, swallowtail, harlequin duck: believe in this refuge vivid tips of oleander white and red perimeters where no perimeter should be here is another in my long list of asides: why have I never had a clock that actually gained time? that apparatus, which measures out the minutes, is our own image forever losing and so the delicate, unfixed condition of love, the treacherous body the unsettling state of creation and how we have damaged— isn’t one a suitable lens through which to see another: filter the body, filter the mind, filter the resilient land and by resilient I mean which holds which tolerates the inconstant lover, the pitiful treatment the experiment, the untried & untrue, the last stab at wellness choose your own adventure: drug failure or organ failure cataclysmic climate change or something akin to what’s killing bees—colony collapse more like us than we’d allow, this wondrous swatch of rough why do I need to say the toads and moor and clouds— in a spring of misunderstanding, I took the cricket’s sound and delight I took in the sex of every season, the tumble on moss the loud company of musicians, the shy young bookseller anonymous voices that beckoned to ramble to be picked from the crepuscule at the forest’s edge until the nocturnal animals crept forth their eyes like the lamps in store windows forgotten, vaguely firing a desire for home hence, the body’s burden, its resolute campaign:  trudge on and if the war does not shake us from our quietude, nothing will I carry the same baffled heart I have always carried a bit more battered than before, a bit less joy for I see the difficult charge of living in this declining sphere by the open air, I swore out my list of pleasures: sprig of lilac, scent of pine the sparrows bathing in the drainage ditch, their song the lusty thoughts in spring as the yellow violets bloom and the cherry forms its first full buds the tonic cords along the legs and arms of youth and youth passing into maturity, ripening its flesh growing softer, less unattainable, ruddy and spotted plum daily, I mistake—there was a medication I forgot to take there was a man who gave himself, decently, to me & I refused him in a protracted stillness, I saw that heron I didn’t wish to disturb was clearly a white sack caught in the redbud’s limbs I did not comprehend desire as a deadly force until— daylight, don’t leave me now, I haven’t done with you— nor that, in this late hour, we still cannot make peace if I, inconsequential being that I am, forsake all others how many others correspondingly forsake this world light, light: do not go I sing you this song and I will sing another as well

Corpses push up through thawing permafrost as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink; on the porch, motes in slanting yellow light undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous as Venus at dawn? Yesterday I was about to seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom of a decaying exterior jamb when I glimpsed jagged ice floating in a bay. Naval sonar slices through whales, even as a portion of male dorsal fin is served to the captain of an umiak. Stopped in traffic, he swings from a chairlift, gazes down at scarlet paintbrush. Moistening an envelope before sealing it, I recall the slight noise you made when I grazed your shoulder. When a frost wiped out the chalk blue flowering plant by the door, I watered until it revived from the roots. The song of a knife sharpener in an alley passes through the mind of a microbiologist before he undergoes anesthesia for surgery. The first night of autumn has singed bell peppers by the fence, while budding chamisa stalks in the courtyard bend to ground. Observing people conversing at a nearby table, he visualizes the momentary convergence and divergence of lines passing through a point. The wisteria along the porch never blooms; a praying mantis on the wood floor sips water from a dog bowl. Laughter from upstairs echoes downstairs as teenage girls compare bra sizes. An ex-army officer turned critic frets over the composition of a search committee, snickers and disparages rival candidates. A welder, who turns away for a few seconds to gaze at the Sangre de Cristos, detects a line of trucks backed up on an international overpass where exhaust spews onto houses below. The day may be called One Toothroad or Six Thunderpain, but the naming of a day will not transform it, nor will the mathematics of time halt. An imprint of ginkgo leaf—fan-shaped, slightly thickened, slightly wavy on broad edge, two- lobed, with forking parallel veins but no midvein—in a slab of coal is momentary beauty, while ginkgoes along a street dropping gold leaves are mindless beauty of the quotidian. Once thought extinct, the ginkgo was discovered in Himalayan monasteries and propagated back into the world. Although I cannot save a grasshopper singed by frost trying to warm itself on a sunlit walkway, I ponder shadows of budding pink and orange bougainvilleas on a wall. As masons level sand, lay bricks in horizontal then vertical pairs, we construct a ground to render a space our own. As light from a partial lunar eclipse diffuses down skylight walls, we rock and sluice, rock and sluice, fingertips fanned to fanned fingertips, debouch into plenitude. Venus vanishes in a brightening sky: the diamond ring of a solar eclipse persists. You did not have to fly to Zimbabwe in June 2001 to experience it. The day recalls Thirteen Death and One Deer when an end slips into a beginning. I recall mating butterflies with red dots on wings, the bow of a long liner thudding on waves, crescendo of water beginning to boil in a kettle, echoes of humpback whales. In silence, dancers concentrate on movements onstage; lilacs bud by a gate. As bits of consciousness constellate, I rouse to a 3 A.M. December rain on the skylight. A woman sweeps glass shards in a driveway, oblivious to elm branches reflected on windshields of passing cars. Juniper crackles in the fireplace; flukes break the water as a whale dives. The path of totality is not marked by a shadow hurtling across the earth’s surface at three thousand kilometers per hour. Our eyelashes attune to each other. At the mouth of an arroyo, a lamb skull and ribcage bleach in the sand; tufts of fleece caught on barbed wire vanish. The Shang carved characters in the skulls of their enemies, but what transpired here? You do not need to steep turtle shells in blood to prognosticate clouds. Someone dumps a refrigerator upstream in the riverbed while you admire the yellow blossoms of a golden rain tree. A woman weeds, sniffs fragrance from a line of onions in her garden; you scramble an egg, sip oolong tea. The continuous bifurcates into the segmented as the broken extends. Someone steals a newspaper while we doze. A tiger swallowtail lands on a patio columbine; a single agaric breaks soil by a hollyhock. Pushing aside branches of Russian olives to approach the Pojoaque River, we spot a splatter of flicker feathers in the dirt. Here chance and fate enmesh. Here I hold a black bowl rinsed with tea, savor the warmth at my fingertips, aroma of emptiness. We rock back and forth, back and forth on water. Fins of spinner dolphins break the waves; a whale spouts to the north-northwest. What is not impelled? Yellow hibiscus, zodiac, hairbrush; barbed wire, smog, snowflake—when I still my eyes, the moments dilate. Rain darkens gravel in the courtyard; shriveled apples on branches are weightless against dawn.

That whine is the sound of waste, rot, the frantic, grinding inability to attend to anything but sere thwarting of yourself, a dry corrosion which some say they know, but you and I— (my jaw clenched as you turn a page, you with a heart like drywall, I who would lace my arms with razors, then press them slowly to your lips, the metal taste mixing with flesh, and through gritted teeth I making the sound of you, you, you do not know, meaning only me, me) we know best.

Whine as though a pine tree is bowing a broken violin, As though a bandsaw cleaves a thousand thin sheets of titanium; They chime like freight wheels on a Norfolk Southern slowing into town. But all you ever see is the silence. Husks, glued to the underside of maple leaves. With their nineteen fifties Bakelite lines they'd do just as well hanging from the ceiling of a space museum — What cicadas leave behind is a kind of crystallized memory; The stubborn detail of, the shape around a life turned The color of forgotten things: a cold broth of tea & milk in the bottom of a mug. Or skin on an old tin of varnish you have to lift with lineman's pliers. A fly paper that hung thirty years in Bird Cooper's pantry in Brighton.

To the north, along Orange Blossom Trail, thick breath of sludge fires. Smoke rises all night, a spilled genie who loves the freezing trees but cannot save them. Snow fine as blown spiders. The news: nothing. Large rats breed on the beach driving smaller ones here. Today both traps sit sprung.

Where Claribel low-lieth The breezes pause and die, Letting the rose-leaves fall: But the solemn oak-tree sigheth, Thick-leaved, ambrosial, With an ancient melody Of an inward agony, Where Claribel low-lieth. At eve the beetle boometh Athwart the thicket lone: At noon the wild bee hummeth About the moss'd headstone: At midnight the moon cometh, And looketh down alone. Her song the lintwhite swelleth, The clear-voiced mavis dwelleth, The callow throstle lispeth, The slumbrous wave outwelleth, The babbling runnel crispeth, The hollow grot replieth Where Claribel low-lieth.

In her hand the knife, brisk, brilliant as moon-claw, shaves the flesh. It grazes the white belly just over the heart. Underneath, the coiled fingers are cradling a soft flesh as if it were the jowls of the aged man propped for a while on the bench in the park. The head is not severed, the eyes not out. Blue, they appear to flash odd ways where a tree makes a live shadow. Mostly the eyes are dead. Nothing is in them except the intense blue of sky the tree allows. There is no conspiring of nerves, no least event recalled by a limb’s high arching, or even a girl’s ascension from a forgotten distance of water. But there is something as she lifts the meat. It is enough to draw down her gaze. Now her arm rises against yellow hair fallen white in a childish face. She is still as a leaf barely clinging. I come to her like a cat in the stunned grass and touch her to see the startled, upthrusted gleam of her face. At brow and each cheek like gathered beads of mist scales leap with the sun, and are dead. No word passes between us, but something electric as a flash of steel makes her cry out just once. Squatting at the yard’s edge, she sings beyond any thought. Her knife flies as lethal as love and cuts quickly in like a hurried kiss.

The dog and I push through the ring of dripping junipers to enter the open space high on the hill where I let him off the leash. He vaults, snuffling, between tufts of moss; twigs snap beneath his weight; he rolls and rubs his jowls on the aromatic earth; his pink tongue lolls. I look for sticks of proper heft to throw for him, while he sits, prim and earnest in his love, if it is love. All night a soaking rain, and now the hill exhales relief, and the fragrance of warm earth. . . . The sedges have grown an inch since yesterday, and ferns unfurled, and even if they try the lilacs by the barn can’t keep from opening today. I longed for spring’s thousand tender greens, and the white-throated sparrow’s call that borders on rudeness. Do you know— since you went away all I can do is wait for you to come back to me.

The sunbox lies in pieces, its strips of aluminum foil flaking away to the wind, tanning platform broken up for kindling. Planted grass sprouts where the path once sharply turned to the left circumventing underbrush, there the man (a boy then) stumbled on beauty’s wrath: pale sisters yelling him off, scrambling for clothes to cover. All has been cleared, thick cat briar raked into piles and set ablaze, invincible ailanthus stacked for dump. All’s clear and calm save his childhood rushing head- long through tearing thickets, and the sisters, barely glimpsed against reflective flashing, laughing after him, then lying back to catch all the sullen autumn sun they can.