1630 Nature poems

I want to go to the other bank The river water alters the sky's colour and alters me I am in the current my shadow stands by the river bank like a tree struck by lightning I want to go to the other bank In the trees on the other bank a solitary startled wood pigeon flies towards me

1. Bridge’s absence gave the creek a new aspect. Uncrossable, irascible. Crosser stems on the bank with her will and form, extension “Phantom of incapacity which is me.” Bright roar of water, x of indomitability. 2. The bridge is not an x. It bridges nothing. The turmoil is only a portion. 3. Bridge on the grass is brideless. Tufts of terra like a bloom in air. Rational slats, a surface’s accretion, slat system. Grass tints it, heliotropic emanation, sharp, up, or complex occupation in shiving rain. 4. Creek’s uncrossability, a new beauty. “It looked like the process of a thinking, deep run.” It became the suffering of form and mute suggestion. The syllables were not perennial. They broke and grew. 5. The blue pants of the crosser were neither sky nor water. They orient to the body as form and boundary. The crosser’s green shirt neither grass nor leaf-thought. Desire to not get wet, another hurt. 6. “Glamour of limit, where the rocks just slant” down the bank, in a wet stratification, and the creek spills blows and goings and is omniform leaving, a prime of seem. 7. High water as a contour of relation swells, hurls. The creek which was other but not antipodal, or refusal. “The wish to touch it with my phenomenal hand” loves it as material. 8. The bridge made the force containable. Bridgeless the crosser sits, and very still. “My phenomenal body crosses and longs.” Ceaseless body of the audible.

Our eye goes past the hieroglyphic tree to the swimmer carving a wake in the water. And almost to the railroad bridge from which the swimmer might have dived. Then, as though come to the end of its tether, our gaze returns, pulling toward the blemish on the surface of the print. An L-shaped chemical dribble, it sabotages the scene’s transparence and siphons off its easy appeal. At the same time, the blemish joins together the realms of seer and swimmer in our experience of plunging into and out of the image.

I am the blossom pressed in a book, found again after two hundred years. . . . I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper.... When the young girl who starves sits down to a table she will sit beside me. . . . I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . . I am water rushing to the wellhead, filling the pitcher until it spills. . . . I am the patient gardener of the dry and weedy garden. . . . I am the stone step, the latch, and the working hinge. . . . I am the heart contracted by joy. . . . the longest hair, white before the rest. . . . I am there in the basket of fruit presented to the widow. . . . I am the musk rose opening unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . . I am the one whose love overcomes you, already with you when you think to call my name. . . .

I Brag, sweet tenor bull, descant on Rawthey’s madrigal, each pebble its part for the fells’ late spring. Dance tiptoe, bull, black against may. Ridiculous and lovely chase hurdling shadows morning into noon. May on the bull’s hide and through the dale furrows fill with may, paving the slowworm’s way. A mason times his mallet to a lark’s twitter, listening while the marble rests, lays his rule at a letter’s edge, fingertips checking, till the stone spells a name naming none, a man abolished. Painful lark, labouring to rise! The solemn mallet says: In the grave’s slot he lies. We rot. Decay thrusts the blade, wheat stands in excrement trembling. Rawthey trembles. Tongue stumbles, ears err for fear of spring. Rub the stone with sand, wet sandstone rending roughness away. Fingers ache on the rubbing stone. The mason says: Rocks happen by chance. No one here bolts the door, love is so sore. Stone smooth as skin, cold as the dead they load on a low lorry by night. The moon sits on the fell but it will rain. Under sacks on the stone two children lie, hear the horse stale, the mason whistle, harness mutter to shaft, felloe to axle squeak, rut thud the rim, crushed grit. Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey, head to a hard arm, they kiss under the rain, bruised by their marble bed. In Garsdale, dawn; at Hawes, tea from the can. Rain stops, sacks steam in the sun, they sit up. Copper-wire moustache, sea-reflecting eyes and Baltic plainsong speech declare: By such rocks men killed Bloodaxe. Fierce blood throbs in his tongue, lean words. Skulls cropped for steel caps huddle round Stainmore. Their becks ring on limestone, whisper to peat. The clogged cart pushes the horse downhill. In such soft air they trudge and sing, laying the tune frankly on the air. All sounds fall still, feilside bleat, hide-and-seek peewit. Her pulse their pace, palm countering palm, till a trench is filled, stone white as cheese jeers at the dale. Knotty wood, hard to rive, smoulders to ash; smell of October apples. The road again, at a trot. Wetter, warmed, they watch the mason meditate on name and date. Rain rinses the road, the bull streams and laments. Sour rye porridge from the hob with cream and black tea, meat, crust and crumb. Her parents in bed the children dry their clothes. He has untied the tape of her striped flannel drawers before the range. Naked on the pricked rag mat his fingers comb thatch of his manhood’s home. Gentle generous voices weave over bare night words to confirm and delight till bird dawn. Rainwater from the butt she fetches and flannel to wash him inch by inch, kissing the pebbles. Shining slowworm part of the marvel. The mason stirs: Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write. Every birth a crime, every sentence life. Wiped of mould and mites would the ball run true? No hope of going back. Hounds falter and stray, shame deflects the pen. Love murdered neither bleeds nor stifles but jogs the draftsman’s elbow. What can he, changed, tell her, changed, perhaps dead? Delight dwindles. Blame stays the same. Brief words are hard to find, shapes to carve and discard: Bloodaxe, king of York, king of Dublin, king of Orkney. Take no notice of tears; letter the stone to stand over love laid aside lest insufferable happiness impede flight to Stainmore, to trace lark, mallet, becks, flocks and axe knocks. Dung will not soil the slowworm’s mosaic. Breathless lark drops to nest in sodden trash; Rawthey truculent, dingy. Drudge at the mallet, the may is down, fog on fells. Guilty of spring and spring’s ending amputated years ache after the bull is beef, love a convenience. It is easier to die than to remember. Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate.

—for N.C. 1 Among all the harvests these are ones we make myth of— heat loosening squash spicing the dew as we rush to fill the restaurant order— haul our ripe crates. Organic cash crop: to market, to market. 2 New worlds on the sky, sungold solar systems. Gold balls on the chain. We map our hands in the scent of tomato. 3 Lost ones sag. Lost ones break. Birds peck. The ground oozes. The unpicked fruit wavers. We catch what we can. 4 Basic: between stalks for hours in binary motion—ripe/ not ripe, not mental really not boring either decisions of thumb & forefinger forging attunement between body & vine; as if picking were all we were made for— plop plop in crates in our upturned shirts. 5 I was in the field the day you called to say you’d lose the baby. How your sac was broken, and there was no saving it, just the waiting. I stood there, the whole day wrapped around me. I stood there, crying, smelling vine. 6 Another day of work. Another. 7 All month I thought of you, of us, the women, of all the trying to & breaking open. Of the rainsplit? ones, the ones that burst. And of the smells of vine & harvest. I wanted to give you tomatoes. 8 Here, a life is many ripened. Sprung, the seeded cells, a fragile mix of luck and tending. Warm furze blur of dust & buzzing. Tangle risen from the mud & marching. Here we are not self but species breaking as we bend & also fruiting pressing onward in the long bright tide: yes it breaks & yes it also swells—

Oblong, its jutted ends rounding into circles, The old sunken basin lies with its flat, marble lip An inch below the terrace tiles. Over the stagnant water Slide reflections: The blue-green of coned yews; The purple and red of trailing fuchsias Dripping out of marble urns; Bright squares of sky Ribbed by the wake of a swimming beetle. Through the blue-bronze water Wavers the pale uncertainty of a shadow. An arm flashes through the reflections, A breast is outlined with leaves. Outstretched in the quiet water The statue of a Goddess slumbers. But when Autumn comes The beech leaves cover her with a golden counter-pane.

Seated once by a brook, watching a child Chiefly that paddled, I was thus beguiled. Mellow the blackbird sang and sharp the thrush Not far off in the oak and hazel brush, Unseen. There was a scent like honeycomb From mugwort dull. And down upon the dome Of the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oft A butterfly alighted. From aloft He took the heat of the sun, and from below. On the hot stone he perched contented so, As if never a cart would pass again That way; as if I were the last of men And he the first of insects to have earth And sun together and to know their worth. I was divided between him and the gleam, The motion, and the voices, of the stream, The waters running frizzled over gravel, That never vanish and for ever travel. A grey flycatcher silent on a fence And I sat as if we had been there since The horseman and the horse lying beneath The fir-tree-covered barrow on the heath, The horseman and the horse with silver shoes, Galloped the downs last. All that I could lose I lost. And then the child’s voice raised the dead. “No one’s been here before” was what she said And what I felt, yet never should have found A word for, while I gathered sight and sound.

Welcome, Flowers. Write your name on a name tag. Find a seat. Raise your leaf if you've taken a class here before. Let's go around the room. Call out your colors. I see someone's petal has fallen— please pick it up and put it in your desk where it belongs. Sprinklers at recess, fertilizer for lunch, and you may snack on the sun throughout the day. Excuse me . . . what's that in your mouth? A bee? Did you bring enough for everyone?

The bug’s psalm: don’t get crushed. Afterlives feel meaningless but spring will come, push out the nubs the kids braid into pallets. Take up your pallet from lawns noon’s hardly touched. The small think gods just loll on clouds. Bugs think gods just crush.