1630 Nature poems

In Homer, the gods take the place of consciousness. For me, it is birds. Gray gulls seen from above, a tan and white pigeon bringing amoral intelligence to the balcony wall. Geoff says they are really getting tough on birds in Brighton. Bringing in a bylaw. I remember his balcony it’s really just the roof of the room downstairs but when you climb out the window you get a view of the sea and the ferris wheel which I believe is gone, or going it was an eyesore all the locals said though I — of course — thought it was wonderful and the burned-down pier out in the water.

Did wind and wave design the albatross's wing, honed compliances: or is it effrontery to suggest that the wing designed the gales and seas: are we guests here, then, with all the gratitude and soft-walking of the guest: provisions and endurances of riverbeds, mountain shoulders, windings through of tulip poplar, grass, and sweet-frosted foxgrape: are we to come into these and leave them as they are: are the rivers in us, and the slopes, ours that the world's imitate, or are we mirrorments merely of a high designing aloof and generous as a host to us: what would become of us if we declined and staked out a level affirmation of our own: we wind the brook into our settlement and husband the wind to our sails and blades: what is to be grateful when let alone to itself, as for a holiday in naturalness: the albatross, ah, fishes the waves with a will beyond the waves' will, and we, to our own doings, put down the rising of sea or mountain slope: except we do not finally put it down: still, till the host appears, we'll make the masters here.

Eight stars make A soft solfege Above this motel Where there are never Stars. I let a skinny man Put his long thick dick in me for you So we could break our hearts The way you want me to. Somewhere a white Wall stretches up behind the backs of a tribe Whose obscurity protects its secret from the common World and the connivances it ordains. What time is it. What season is it. I don’t know. The moon blows green Gas into my skull I want to hide what I dream In a big boot, and wear the boot And starve as I lean upon the boot of my destitution And drag The truth as a gimp would drag the weight of her body. That would give me a feeling of honesty.

A fox looked at his shadow at sunrise and said, “I will have a camel for lunch today.”  And all morning he went about looking for camels.  But at noon he saw his shadow again—and he said, “A mouse will do.”

On limbs of slanted light painted with my mind’s skin color, I step upon black braids, oil-drenched, worming from last month’s orphaned mouth. Winged with burning — I ferry them from my filmed eyes, wheezing. Scalp blood in my footprints — my buckskin pouch filling with photographed sand. No language but its rind crackling in the past tense. • Tearing apart cloud names — pierced fog commands: douse the inferno’s ribs with opaque forgetting; clip dawn from the book’s dusk, unfasten the song’s empty auditorium over a garden of mute foals. Tearing apart fog names — pierced cloud sings: let them shriek from their hinges, let them slice their gills open with flint knives and circle their ghosts as frog-skinned antelope, let them drag their legs over a trail anchored to a ladder that has soaked up blood since land began crawling out of anthills. • Slipping into free fall, we drip-pattern:the somewhere parts, our shoulders dissolving in somewhere mud. The arcing sun whistles across the mask’s abalone brow, its blurring pouts into a forest chirping from a lake’s bite marks stamped vertically on this map’s windowsill. Kneeling our thoughts on ellipses evaporating from ollas of fragrant wet clay — we saddle the drowning’s slippery rim.

from the sustaining air fresh air There is the clarity of a shore And shadow,   mostly,   brilliance summer the billows of August When, wandering, I look from my page I say nothing when asked I am, finally, an incompetent, after all

1. Through the night the apples outside my window one by one let go their branches and drop to the lawn. I can’t see, but hear the stem-snap, the plummet through leaves, then the final thump against the ground. Sometimes two at once, or one right after another. During long moments of silence I wait and wonder about the bruised bodies, the terror of diving through air, and think I’ll go tomorrow to find the newly fallen, but they all look alike lying there dewsoaked, disappearing before me. 2. I lie beneath my window listening to the sound of apples dropping in the yard, a syncopated code I long to know, which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know the meaning of what I hear, each dull thud of unseen apple- body, the earth falling to earth once and forever, over and over.

Out of a high meadow where flowers bloom above cloud, come down; pursue me with reasons for smiling without malice. Bring mimic pride like that of the seedling fir, surprise in the perfect leg-stems and queries unstirred by recognition or fear pooled in the deep eyes. Come down by regions where rocks lift through the hot haze of pain; down landscapes darkened, crossed by the rift of death-shock; place print of a neat hoof on trampled ground where not one leaf or root remains unbitten; but come down always, accompany me to the morass of the decaying mind. There we’ll share one rotted stump between us.

Olive seashells in the air you can eat. The very inner of the inner ear in the breeze. Last night my son dreamt about falling out of trees. I had almost forgotten that we were simians. The fiddlehead turns on itself but only ever in love. Green cinnamon roll, a snake too small to hunt anyone. Curled in like my son’s fingers, his fists. More beautiful than a spider fern, spun-in island, moldy tongue of a hippopotamus, the eye of the forest. When my son wakes up screaming I don’t pick him up right away. I tell him where he is and who I am. At night all the fiddlehead wants to do is sleep. When I sleep I dream about death adders curling around his soft body, all of us making the same kinds of sounds.

I From the false summit, coxcomb-cum-arête, cool thermals underscore our frailties, past edges where our wingless feet are set and the long look down dilutes the evergreens. As sandstone ends, the world of ghosts begins— they sometimes rise up still in dreams, my love. With one hand firm, I step onto the skin of the abyss, embracing what’s above and severing spent ties to the scree below. The filtered light turns lichen eerie green, ushering in a world we hardly know, at least not one we’re sure we’ve ever seen just so, each climber brand new in his skin, no longer mired in waiting to begin. ii