1630 Nature poems

For a month now, wandering over the Sierras, A poem had been gathering in my mind, Details of significance and rhythm, The way poems do, but still lacking a focus. Last night I remembered the date and it all Began to grow together and take on purpose. We sat up late while Deneb moved over the zenith And I told Marie all about Boston, how it looked That last terrible week, how hundreds stood weeping Impotent in the streets that last midnight. I told her how those hours changed the lives of thousands, How America was forever a different place Afterwards for many. In the morning We swam in the cold transparent lake, the blue Damsel flies on all the reeds like millions Of narrow metallic flowers, and I thought Of you behind the grille in Dedham, Vanzetti, Saying, “Who would ever have thought we would make this history?” Crossing the brilliant mile-square meadow Illuminated with asters and cyclamen, The pollen of the lodgepole pines drifting With the shifting wind over it and the blue And sulphur butterflies drifting with the wind, I saw you in the sour prison light, saying, “Goodbye comrade.” In the basin under the crest Where the pines end and the Sierra primrose begins, A party of lawyers was shooting at a whiskey bottle. The bottle stayed on its rock, nobody could hit it. Looking back over the peaks and canyons from the last lake, The pattern of human beings seemed simpler Than the diagonals of water and stone. Climbing the chute, up the melting snow and broken rock, I remembered what you said about Sacco, How it slipped your mind and you demanded it be read into the record. Traversing below the ragged arête, One cheek pressed against the rock The wind slapping the other, I saw you both marching in an army You with the red and black flag, Sacco with the rattlesnake banner. I kicked steps up the last snow bank and came To the indescribably blue and fragrant Polemonium and the dead sky and the sterile Crystalline granite and final monolith of the summit. These are the things that will last a long time, Vanzetti, I am glad that once on your day I have stood among them. Some day mountains will be named after you and Sacco. They will be here and your name with them, “When these days are but a dim remembering of the time When man was wolf to man.” I think men will be remembering you a long time Standing on the mountains Many men, a long time, comrade.

A blue stain creeps across the deep pile of the evergreens. From inside the forest it seems like an interior matter, something wholly to do with trees, a color passed from one to another, a requirement to which they submit unflinchingly like soldiers or brave people getting older. Then the sun comes back and it’s totally over.

It approaches from the sea, too small For thunder and lightning But ominous as a closed fist And what it will bring Nearing us, growing larger, Is completely unknown.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder. I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast; And all the night 'tis my pillow white, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, Lightning my pilot sits; In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, It struggles and howls at fits; Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion, This pilot is guiding me, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea; Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, Over the lakes and the plains, Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream, The Spirit he loves remains; And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile, Whilst he is dissolving in rains. The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, When the morning star shines dead; As on the jag of a mountain crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings. And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of Heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on mine aëry nest, As still as a brooding dove. That orbèd maiden with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the Moon, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor, By the midnight breezes strewn; And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, Which only the angels hear, May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, The stars peep behind her and peer; And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, Till calm the rivers, lakes, and seas, Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, Are each paved with the moon and these. I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone, And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl. From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Over a torrent sea, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch through which I march With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair, Is the million-coloured bow; The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove, While the moist Earth was laughing below. I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.

The clouds as I see them, rising urgently, roseate in the mounting of somber power surging in evening haste over roofs and hermetic grim walls— Last night as if death had lit a pale light in your flesh, your flesh was cold to my touch, or not cold but cool, cooling, as if the last traces of warmth were still fading in you. My thigh burned in cold fear where yours touched it. But I forced to mind my vision of a sky close and enclosed, unlike the space in which these clouds move— a sky of gray mist it appeared— and how looking intently at it we saw its gray was not gray but a milky white in which radiant traces of opal greens, fiery blues, gleamed, faded, gleamed again, and how only then, seeing the color in the gray, a field sprang into sight, extending between where we stood and the horizon, a field of freshest deep spiring grass starred with dandelions, green and gold gold and green alternating in closewoven chords, madrigal field. Is death’s chill that visited our bed other than what it seemed, is it a gray to be watched keenly? Wiping my glasses and leaning westward, clearing my mind of the day’s mist and leaning into myself to see the colors of truth I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.

It is windy today. A wall of wind crashes against, windows clunk against, iron frames as wind swings past broken glass and seethes, like a frightened cat in empty spaces of the cellblock. In the exercise yard we sat huddled in our prison jackets, on our haunches against the fence, and the wind carried our words over the fences, while the vigilant guard on the tower held his cap at the sudden gust. I could see the main tower from where I sat, and the wind in my face gave me the feeling I could grasp the tower like a cornstalk, and snap it from its roots of rock. The wind plays it like a flute, this hollow shoot of rock. The brim girded with barbwire with a guard sitting there also, listening intently to the sounds as clouds cover the sun. I thought of the day I was coming to prison, in the back seat of a police car, hands and ankles chained, the policeman pointed, “See that big water tank? The big silver one out there, sticking up? That’s the prison.” And here I am, I cannot believe it. Sometimes it is such a dream, a dream, where I stand up in the face of the wind, like now, it blows at my jacket, and my eyelids flick a little bit, while I stare disbelieving. . . . The third day of spring, and four years later, I can tell you, how a man can endure, how a man can become so cruel, how he can die or become so cold. I can tell you this, I have seen it every day, every day, and still I am strong enough to love you, love myself and feel good; even as the earth shakes and trembles, and I have not a thing to my name, I feel as if I have everything, everything.

On a brain-gray day, he lay on the hill-slanted solar array with a southern exposure, toes in the clover mixed in with what are these pentagrammatic sprays of pinnate leaves. No clover here has four leaves: to each one he says I have seen you before in the nuclear hazard symbol and then again (as again slants backward) before that, as nothing but clover when childhood was not yet over and everything was symbol therefore nothing was.

A strong song tows us, long earsick. Blind, we follow rain slant, spray flick to fields we do not know. Night, float us. Offshore wind, shout, ask the sea what’s lost, what’s left, what horn sunk, what crown adrift. Where we are who knows of kings who sup while day fails? Who, swinging his axe to fell kings, guesses where we go?

The smell, once water has rinsed it, is like a field of ripe grain, or the grain held in a truck, and if you climb the steel side, one foot lodged on the hubcap, the other on the wheel, and pull your body upward, your hands holding to tarp hooks, and lift toes onto the rim of the truck box, rest your ribs against the side, you will see beetles and grasshoppers among the hulled kernels. Water stirs and resurrects harvest dust: sun beating on abundance, the moist heat of grain collected in steel, hands plunging and lifting, the grain spilling back.

Onward the fairweather spleen. Onward the season of vent and caprice. Giovedì Grasso flies the meat, trees still larded with winter grease — ice, the Dead Time, the Flensing Time. Flirt fattened Thursday of December’s gorge. The twelve pigs of the zodiac stew the zeal, slow simmering giddy fizzling squeals. Uncloister the close-air surgical theater. Ungristle the knife-jester’s grip. Let the butcher carnival begin!