1630 Nature poems

More than the beetles turned russet, sunset, dragging their shield, more than the crickets who think it’s evening all afternoon, it’s the bees I love this time of year. Sated, maybe drunk, who’ve lapped at the hips of too many flowers for one summer but still must go on hunting, one secret closing, another ensuing, picking lock after lock, rapping the glass, getting stuck in a puddle of dish soap, almost winter, almost dark, reading far past the last paragraph into the back blank page, acknowledgments, and history of type. I think when my head finally cracks out will come one of those ravening scouts autumnal with hunger beyond any sipping, swallowing, beyond the hive’s teeming factory’s needs. I think maybe then, when I’m dying like a bug in a puddle of dish soap, I’ll be relieved, my wings wet capes and not working, antennae slicked back and not working, eye that sees the ruby above going out, eye that sees the ruby within getting brighter as I drag myself to a tomato ripening on the window sill, reddest, softest island of my last planet, last aureola, stinger waving and useless. I’ll wait then, while air from the north rushes gulf air, a tree indicating wildly, each leaf woke in orange outcry. It won’t be suffering, exactly. Rain coming, then gone, a chill that means all my barbarous kind are alone and perishing, our unrecognizable young buried and waiting, bodies of fire becoming bodies of air. I don’t think there’s any way to prepare.

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant, driving over the hills from work. There are the dark parts on the road when you pass through clumps of wood and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean, but that doesn’t make the road an allegory. I should call Marie and apologize for being so boring at dinner last night, but can I really promise not to be that way again? And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing in what certainly looks like sexual arousal. Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail; the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves are full of infant chlorophyll, the very tint of inexperience. Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio, and on the highway overpass, the only metaphysical vandal in America has written MEMORY LOVES TIME in big black spraypaint letters, which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back. Last night I dreamed of X again. She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets. Years ago she penetrated me but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, I never got her out, but now I’m glad. What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle. What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel. What I thought was an injustice turned out to be a color of the sky. Outside the youth center, between the liquor store and the police station, a little dogwood tree is losing its mind; overflowing with blossomfoam, like a sudsy mug of beer; like a bride ripping off her clothes, dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds, so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene. It’s been doing that all week: making beauty, and throwing it away, and making more.

Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the purple of ripe grapes sunlit and warm as flesh. Every day I will give you a color, like a new flower in a bud vase on your desk. Every day I will paint you, as women color each other with henna on hands and on feet. Red as henna, as cinnamon, as coals after the fire is banked, the cardinal in the feeder, the roses tumbling on the arbor their weight bending the wood the red of the syrup I make from petals. Orange as the perfumed fruit hanging their globes on the glossy tree, orange as pumpkins in the field, orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs who come to eat it, orange as my cat running lithe through the high grass. Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes, yellow as a hill of daffodils, yellow as dandelions by the highway, yellow as butter and egg yolks, yellow as a school bus stopping you, yellow as a slicker in a downpour. Here is my bouquet, here is a sing song of all the things you make me think of, here is oblique praise for the height and depth of you and the width too. Here is my box of new crayons at your feet. Green as mint jelly, green as a frog on a lily pad twanging, the green of cos lettuce upright about to bolt into opulent towers, green as Grand Chartreuse in a clear glass, green as wine bottles. Blue as cornflowers, delphiniums, bachelors’ buttons. Blue as Roquefort, blue as Saga. Blue as still water. Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat. Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop. Cobalt as the midnight sky when day has gone without a trace and we lie in each other’s arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark. Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar; And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk By beech and yew and perishing juniper Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter, The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper, Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark The Combe looks since they killed the badger there, Dug him out and gave him to the hounds, That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

As long as you believe in miracles You watch the sun fall into the sea Every evening Then you turn your back and sink Among the ferns sparkling from a moon or from the other Night up to your knees under the vault of cries. The pubescent monkeys, the adolescent pumas Contemplate the slender crescent Of the earth In the eyes of a dead viper That knots on the asphalt The alpha of a future alphabet. It’s the end of night the mosquitoes Place themselves on your forehead and die with you In the ruins of your dreams erected By the distant suggestions of cities Where you wish to find an empty Bed to die in. The cathedrals the cinemas the soliloquies The beggar’s ear glued to the violin Music To be lovesick when the songs All temple prostitutes all rotgut for two cents Are going to end up in the pink slit of a jukebox. Hope is under the hand that weak flesh Groped massaged turgescent with eyes shut Comes and goes Let’s keep knotted kisses to ourselves for a long time Until another day erases The trace of each passing.

Under fluorescent light, aligned on a bench and table top, oranges the size of marbles dangle from trees with glossy leaves. White trumpets bloom in tiny clay pots. Under a firethorn’s twisted limbs, a three inch monk holds a cup from which he appears to drink the interior life. The potter prizes his bonsai children who will never grow up, never leave home.

Fishing, if I a fisher may protest, Of pleasures is the sweetest, of sports the best, Of exercises the most excellent. Of recreations the most innocent. But now the sport is marred, and what, ye, why? Fishes decrease, and fishers multiply.

These roads will take you into your own country. Seasons and maps coming where this road comes into a landscape mirrored in these men. Past all your influences, your home river, constellations of cities, mottoes of childhood, parents and easy cures, war, all evasion’s wishes. What one word must never be said? Dead, and these men fight off our dying, cough in the theatres of the war. What two things shall never be seen? They : what we did.     Enemy : what we mean. This is a nation’s scene and halfway house. What three things can never be done? Forget.     Keep silent.     Stand alone. The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain. The facts of war forced into actual grace. Seasons and modern glory.     Told in the histories, how first ships came seeing on the Atlantic thirteen clouds lining the west horizon with their white shining halations; they conquered, throwing off impossible Europe— could not be used to transform; created coast— breathed-in America. See how they took the land, made after-life fresh out of exile, planted the pioneer base and blockade, pushed forests down in an implacable walk west where new clouds lay at the desirable body of sunset; taking the seaboard.     Replaced the isolation, dropped cities where they stood, drew a tidewater frontier of Europe, a moment, and another frontier held, this land was planted home-land that we know. Ridge of discovery, until we walk to windows, seeing America lie in a photograph of power, widened before our forehead, and still behind us falls another glory, London unshaken, the long French road to Spain, the old Mediterranean flashing new signals from the hero hills near Barcelona, monuments and powers, parent defenses. Before our face the broad and concrete west, green ripened field, frontier pushed back like river controlled and dammed; the flashing wheatfields, cities, lunar plains grey in Nevada, the sane fantastic country sharp in the south, liveoak, the hanging moss, a world of desert, the dead, the lava, and the extreme arisen fountain of life, the flourished land, people with watercourses to California and the colored sea; sums of frontiers and unmade boundaries of acts and poems, the brilliant scene between the seas, and standing, this fact and this disease. ______________ Half-memories absorb us, and our ritual world carries its history in familiar eyes, planted in flesh it signifies its music in minds which turn to sleep and memory, in music knowing all the shimmering names, the spear, the castle, and the rose. But planted in our flesh these valleys stand, everywhere we begin to know the illness, are forced up, and our times confirm us all. In the museum life, centuries of ambition yielded at last a fertilizing image: the Carthaginian stone meaning a tall woman carries in her two hands the book and cradled dove, on her two thighs, wings folded from the waist cross to her feet, a pointed human crown. This valley is given to us like a glory. To friends in the old world, and their lifting hands that call for intercession. Blow falling full in face. All those whose childhood made learn skill to meet, and art to see after the change of heart; all the belligerents who know the world. You standing over gorges, surveyors and planners, you workers and hope of countries, first among powers; you who give peace and bodily repose, opening landscapes by grace, giving the marvel lowlands physical peace, flooding old battlefields with general brilliance, who best love your lives; and you young, you who finishing the poem wish new perfection and begin to make; you men of fact, measure our times again. _____________ These are our strength, who strike against history. These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness to our diseases; these carrying light for safety on their foreheads descended deeper for richer faults of ore, drilling their death. These touching radium and the luminous poison, carried their death on the lips and with their warning glow in their graves. These weaves and their eyes water and rust away, these stand at wheels until their brains corrode, these farm and starve, all these men cry their doom across the world, meeting avoidable death, fight against madness, find every war. Are known as strikers, soldiers, pioneers, fight on all new frontiers, are set in solid lines of defense. Defense is sight; widen the lens and see standing over the land myths of identity, new signals, processes: Alloys begin : certain dominant metals. Deliberate combines add new qualities, sums of new uses. Over the country, from islands of Maine fading, Cape Sable fading south into the orange detail of sunset, new processes, new signals, new possession. A name for all the conquests, prediction of victory deep in these powers. Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene, to photograph and to extend the voice, to speak this meaning. Voices to speak to us directly.     As we move. As we enrich, growing in larger motion, this word, this power. Down coasts of taken countries, mastery, discovery at one hand, and at the other frontiers and forests, fanatic cruel legend at our back and speeding ahead the red and open west, and this our region, desire, field, beginning.    Name and road, communication to these many men, as epilogue, seeds of unending love.

All power is saved, having no end.     Rises in the green season, in the sudden season the white the budded and the lost. Water celebrates, yielding continually sheeted and fast in its overfall slips down the rock, evades the pillars building its colonnades, repairs in stream and standing wave retains its seaward green broken by obstacle rock; falling, the water sheet spouts, and the mind dances, excess of white. White brilliant function of the land’s disease. Many-spanned, lighted, the crest leans under concrete arches and the channeled hills, turns in the gorge toward its release; kinetic and controlled, the sluice urging the hollow, the thunder, the major climax energy total and open watercourse praising the spillway, fiery glaze, crackle of light, cleanest velocity flooding, the moulded force. I open out a way over the water I form a path between the Combatants: Grant that I sail down like a living bird, power over the fields and Pool of Fire. Phoenix, I sail over the phoenix world. Diverted water, the fern and fuming white ascend in mist of continuous diffusion. Rivers are turning inside their mountains, streams line the stone, rest at the overflow lake and in lanes of pliant color lie. Blessing of this innumerable silver, printed in silver, images of stone walk on a screen of falling water in film-silver in continual change recurring colored, plunging with the wave. Constellations of light, abundance of many rivers. The sheeted island-cities, the white surf filling west, the hope, fast water spilled where still pools fed. Great power flying deep: between the rock and the sunset, the caretaker’s house and the steep abutment, hypnotic water fallen and the tunnels under the moist and fragile galleries of stone, mile-long, under the wave. Whether snow fall, the quick light fall, years of white cities fall, flood that this valley built falls slipping down the green turn in the river’s green. Steep gorge, the wedge of crystal in the sky. How many feet of whirlpools? What is a year in terms of falling water? Cylinders; kilowatts; capacities. Continuity: Σ Q = 0 Equations for falling water. The streaming motion. The balance-sheet of energy that flows passing along its infinite barrier. It breaks the hills, cracking the riches wide, runs through electric wires; it comes, warning the night, running among these rigid hills, a single force to waken our eyes. They poured the concrete and the columns stood, laid bare the bedrock, set the cells of steel, a dam for monument was what they hammered home. Blasted, and stocks went up; insured the base, and limousines wrote their own graphs upon roadbed and lifeline. Their hands touched mastery: wait for defense, solid across the world. Mr. Griswold. “A corporation is a body without a soul.” Mr. Dunn. When they were caught at it they resorted to the methods employed by gunmen, ordinary machine gun racke- teers. They cowardly tried to buy out the people who had the information on them. Mr. Marcantonio. I agree that a racket has been practised, but the most damnable racketeering that I have ever known is the paying of a fee to the very attorney who represented these victims. That is the most outrageous racket that has ever come within my knowledge. Miss Allen. Mr. Jesse J. Ricks, the president of the Union Carbide & Carbon Corporation, suggested that the stockholder had better take this question up in a private conference. The dam is safe. A scene of power. The dam is the father of the tunnel. This is the valley’s work, the white, the shining. Stock and Dividend in                                                                 Net Closing High  Low            Dollars                   Open   High   Low    Last   Chge. Bid    Ask    Sales 111   61 ¼  Union Carbide (3.20)...67 ¼   69 ½  67 ¼  69 ½   +3     69 ¼  69 ½ 3 ,400 The dam is used when the tunnel is used. The men and the water are never idle, have definitions. This is a perfect fluid, having no age nor hours, surviving scarless, unaltered, loving rest, willing to run forever to find its peace in equal seas in currents of still glass. Effects of friction : to fight and pass again, learning its power, conquering boundaries, able to rise blind in revolts of tide, broken and sacrificed to flow resumed. Collecting eternally power. Spender of power, torn, never can be killed, speeded in filaments, million, its power can rest and rise forever, wait and be flexible. Be born again. Nothing is lost, even among the wars, imperfect flow, confusion of force. It will rise. These are the phases of its face. It knows its seasons, the waiting, the sudden. It changes. It does not die.

Argument