1630 Nature poems

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

When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s edge, unseen, the salt ocean lifts its form—chicory and daisies tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone but color and the movement—or the shape perhaps—of restlessness, whereas the sea is circled and sways peacefully upon its plantlike stem

I wonder if anyone ever thought to tell time with them     know where their shadow tipped on 3 o'clock    which floor   which parking spot from a window desk    or if they ever stood completely over their own shade's dot that moment they had no metered footprint; a peek-a-boo we now find ticketed as a before and an after    an either side of a space the zero pulls into, its long reserve wheel of nothing there. Yet here a gnomon of absence bears its shadow placement on some dial of brevity and cold about life       about the footprint we may leave empty of light    empty of even point to it. Here it's flat and densely packed with people unlike the empty open of the plain; here our expanse    the grown over dumpsite of the meadowlands wetlands or the shore is corps of engineered   the bulldozer-beetle's ball of dung shines in it       and somewhere the body hidden in our shit to fake us innocent... one of our jokes sometimes      things rise and float. We in the morning catch, from the train, in the green garbage runoff, sight of white herons and the cormorants. When they’re there in the evening, we safely assume the world hasn’t gone anywhere; a take of bearings       the same the next morning when we’d see the lit towers on the island we were headed for      we see now the hour. From the Jersey side we take a bearing, as on mountains from the vantage of the plain, on the towers from the vantage of the dirt-stiffened, unyielding, tarmac of marsh grass     gray like steel grayed a vegetable steel from blur and the exhausts of the turnpike. Position with regard to surrounding objects here is unlike in the mountains which give a bearing even from deep within them, let you see them from inside their formation. Climbing to the high plateau of the street from the subway, we check the peaks downtown or midtown    skyscrapers for direction. Walk a few doors up the block    they parallax eclipsed by the postcard we no more see. * There was a deep well lit its entire depth at noon on the solstice       light without shadow: so with an in-line position with regard to the sun       any cast line of shadow would indicate a curve; the distance between one and not,   an arc of circumference. That phrase of the psalm says death’s shadow is as deep as that valley which is our grave; its length is the same cast everywhere       as deep; no one’s is further from death than another’s; death surrounds us       is our uncurbed circumference. We map our way with only the bearing of surrounding life      itself borderless uncontrolled by the surface of our self. The bridge towers of the Verrazano are so far apart they tilt away from each other on the curve of the earth   factored in. I wonder if from the distance apart of the The Towers you could figure that reach ‘round of the world with this method of shadow? The shadow of flesh casts how deep and far a landscape of perspective?       how round a circumference enough to fit the living world   does a single life turning to its labor spin? Take each story of a building as the radius of expansion      we make of the earth, concentric spheres       on Turtle Island, the hundred ten circumferences go nova So high a reach of vision set on so short a perspective       the world on the turtle's back: at top, the wake of star formation    at base, the animal god.     the jealous Need,    a stomach of feet       trying to stand through this. What can we say of our own that stand in Newark say       so far adrift from a chance to wash      that the dirt on her feet cracks into sores the skin of her soles    and steps her in one more shit infection she has to kick, one more occupation of her body by her monkey rulers she will have to throw off into space       off her back       burned out but clear of starring habit.       Of her destroyed sun    say it endows the landfill       on which to build a new development       “We are the stuff of stars,” Sagan says.

Imagine, not even or really ever tasting a peach until well over 50, not once sympathizing with Blake naked in his garden insisting on angels until getting off the table and coming home with my new heart. How absurd to still have a body in this rainbow-gored, crickety world and how ridiculous to be given one in the first place, to be an object like an orchid is an object, or a stone, so bruisable and plummeting, arms waving from the evening-ignited lake, heading singing in the furnace feral and sweet, tears that make the face grotesque, tears that make it pure. How easy it is now to get drunk on a single whiff like a hummingbird or ant, on the laughter of one woman and who knew how much I’d miss that inner light of snow now that I’m in Texas.