1630 Nature poems

We take more than our share, Several dozen from the star- Flecked cove of a red maple Pond, fins tapered like steeples, Gill to gill in the bucket And bilge, drawn from a thicket Of drowned roots Into the night’s cool garrotes. Sorrowful brothers Choking on strange ethers, Striving, eager, bent Toward the sky by want: It was not to be, this breathing, Though not for nothing.

There is a hornet in the room and one of us will have to go out the window into the late August midafternoon sun. I won. There is a certain challenge in being humane to hornets but not much. A launch draws two lines of wake behind it on the bay like a delta with a melted base. Sandy billows, or so they look, of feathery ripe heads of grass, an acid-yellow kind of goldenrod glowing or glowering in shade. Rocks with rags of shadow, washed dust clouts that will never bleach. It is not like this at all. The rapid running of the lapping water a hollow knock of someone shipping oars: it’s eleven years since Frank sat at this desk and saw and heard it all the incessant water the immutable crickets only not the same: new needles on the spruce, new seaweed on the low-tide rocks other grass and other water even the great gold lichen on a granite boulder even the boulder quite literally is not the same II A day subtle and suppressed in mounds of juniper enfolding scratchy pockets of shadow while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump— stands shadowless in an overcast of ripe grass. There is nothing but shade, like the boggy depths of a stand of spruce, its resonance just the thin scream of mosquitoes ascending. Boats are light lumps on the bay stretching past erased islands to ocean and the terrible tumble and London (“rain persisting”) and Paris (“changing to rain”). Delicate day, setting the bright of a young spruce against the cold of an old one hung with unripe cones each exuding at its tip gum, pungent, clear as a tear, a day tarnished and fractured as the quartz in the rocks of a dulled and distant point, a day like a gull passing with a slow flapping of wings in a kind of lope, without breeze enough to shake loose the last of the fireweed flowers, a faintly clammy day, like wet silk stained by one dead branch the harsh russet of dried blood.

for Seamus Heaney Overture: violins: it is all scraggy, wideawake, ironical, decked out in denim fatigues. Witty and welcoming, leathery-evergreen, bemedalled with beercans, cowpat and wallaby-dung, flap, nub, hinge, node, blindeye quartzite, wafery sandstone, bright as a button subtle for mile on mile far from vulgarity (far from sleek Europe) in its array of furniture tonings sheeted by sunglaze lovingly dusted, wispy and splintery, tussocky, corduroy, all of its idiom dry as a thesis to moist outsiders: wonderfully eloquent on its home ground, branchful of adverbs, lovingly wombat-hued, dreamily sheeptoned, fluted with scalloping surf and every step a joke.

Some days her main job seems to be to welcome back the Red Admiral as it lights on a leaf of the yellow forsythia. It is her duty to stop & lean over to take in how it folds & opens its wings. Then, too, there is the common Tiger Swallowtail, which seems to her entirely uncommon in how it moves about the boundaries of this clearing we made so many years ago. If she leaves the compost bucket unwashed to rescue a single tattered wing from under the winter jasmine or the blue flowers of the periwinkle & then spends a whole afternoon at our round oak table surrounded by field guides & tea until she is sure—yes—that it belongs to a Lorquin's Admiral, or that singular mark is one of the great cat's eyes of a Milbert's Tortoiseshell, then she is simply practicing her true vocation learning the story behind the blue beads of the Mourning Cloak, the silver commas of the Satyr Anglewing, the complex shades of the Spring Azure, moving through this life letting her sweet, light attention land on one luminous thing after another.

Today, no matter if it rains, It’s time to follow the path into the forest. The same people will be walking the same dogs, Or if not the same dogs, dogs that behave in similar fashions, Some barking, some standing aloof. The owners carry plastic bags. But this is the forest, they complain, we must do as we like. We must let the dogs run free, We must follow their example, The way we did when we were young. Back then we slept, watched TV — We were the dogs. By the time the screen door slammed, we were gone. Nobody really talks like that in the forest. They’re proud of their dogs, Proud especially of the ones who never bark. They’re upset about the Norway maple, it’s everywhere, Crowding out the hickories and oaks. Did you know it takes a million seeds to make one tree? Your chances of surviving in the forest, Of replicating yourself, are slim. Today, the smaller dogs are wearing raincoats, The bigger ones are stiffing it out. They’re tense, preoccupied, Running in circles, Getting tangled in the leash— It’s hard remaining human in the forest. To move the limbs of the body, To speak intelligible words, These things promise change.

The nurse-life wheat within his green husk growing, Flatters our hope, and tickles our desire, Nature’s true riches in sweet beauties showing, Which sets all hearts, with labor’s love, on fire. No less fair is the wheat when golden ear Shows unto hope the joys of near enjoying; Fair and sweet is the bud, more sweet and fair the rose, which proves that time is not destroying. Caelica, your youth, the morning of delight, Enamel’d o’er with beauties white and red, All sense and thoughts did to belief invite, That love and glory there are brought to bed; And your ripe year’s love-noon; he goes no higher, Turns all the spirits of man into desire.

Through the branches of the Japanese cherry Blooming like a cloud which will rain A rain white as the sun The living room across the roadway Cuts its square of light And in it fight Two figures, hot, irate, Stuck between sink and sofa in that golden cage. Come out into the night, walk in the night, It is for you, not me. The cherry flowers will rain their rain as white Cool as the moon. Listen how they surround. You swing among them in your cage of light. Come out into the night.

FOR DAVID P—B The eye follows, the land Slips upward, creases down, forms The gentle buttocks of a young Giant. In the nestle, Old adobe bricks, washed of Whiteness, paled to umber, Await another century. Star Jasmine and old vines Lay claim upon the ghosted land, Then quiet pools whisper Private childhood secrets. Flush on inner cottage walls Antiquitous faces, Used to the gelid breath Of old manors, glare disdainfully Over breached time. Around and through these Cold phantasmatalities, He walks, insisting To the languid air, Activity, music, A generosity of graces. His lupin fields spurn old Deceit and agile poppies dance In golden riot.   Each day is Fulminant, exploding brightly Under the gaze of his exquisite Sires, frozen in the famed paint Of dead masters. Audacious Sunlight casts defiance At their feet.

I watched the nesting redstart when we camped by Lake Winnepesaukee. The tent pegs pulled out in soft soil. Rain made pawprints on the canvas. So much clings to the shoes, the old shoes must be discarded, but we're fools to think that does it: burning the scraps. I listened for the rain at Mt. Monadnock, for the barred owl on a tent peak among scrub pines in Michigan. I can hear my father stir and the cot creak. The flap opens. He goes out and never returns though the coffee steams on the grill and the redstart sings in the alders.

I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark that I cut from a tree with a penknife. There is no other way to express adequately the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility that hands you the horizon on a platter. I am also writing this in a wooden canoe, a point of balance in the middle of Lake Couchiching, resting the birch bark against my knees. I can feel the sun’s hands on my bare back, but I am thinking of winter, snow piled up in all the provinces and the solemnity of the long grain-ships that pass the cold months moored at Owen Sound. O Canada, as the anthem goes, scene of my boyhood summers, you are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table, you are the dove-soft train whistle in the night, you are the empty chair at the end of an empty dock. You are the shelves of books in a lakeside cottage: Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery, So You’re Going to Paris! by Clara E. Laughlin, and Peril Over the Airport, one of the Vicky Barr Flight Stewardess series by Helen Wills whom some will remember as the author of the Cherry Ames Nurse stories. What has become of the languorous girls who would pass the long limp summer evenings reading Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse, Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse,