1630 Nature poems

Jets shake the air and snow breaks off a tree branch in little puffs. One cardinal. Cars moving slowly downhill on the ice. It is always someone’s last day. Dearest Bird, she read from the card she’d found unattached to the flowers, Happy Day To Our Sweetest Hart. Love Monster And Beef Dad. Their secret language. Manischewitz, she calls me for the sweetness. Manitoba, for the expanse. Deer rest in snow, charcoal muzzle to charcoal hoof, heads slung over their shoulders like swans. One is in REM. Look at it dreaming, she said. Fern buttons unwheel in a dark place behind the snow, a contrast she loves in me. The sledding hill is closed, the days like an unused billboard, but sunsets have been fantastic, jewel-toned as the flowers unattached to the card, or hot like the cardinal who pins the whole picture up with your eye. Meanwhile, her tree is an iron room with the moon inside. Its branches have a mental disorder so sunsets keep dodging them. I am the color of that tree she loves and nearly as still. And my blood, which is not in this picture, will soon cool, sunset winking out in my eyes and her eyes welling in a language that once fell and rose in drifts then melted, starry, she said, starry, into my warm coat.

Nonentity’s birthplace: a front yard sweeps its dirt clean. Devil hopped up the oak tree, devil-take-the-profit seized a jay in the twigs by the feet, wings buffeting this child’s cheeks to rhyme. Leaf of gift box tissue folded over her pocket comb. Hind pocket kazoo. Won’t somebody please start something other & oddball soon, narrow her down out of folly & trivia to destiny? But Whynot the tortie cat flopped an irregular sunny patch, wriggles & rolls & revives the blissy fits of ignorance. Decades crunch as minor upcountry thunder. My nod to Mastermind’s robot rabbit, said to dwell in his top hat, who tips me a silk evening. Gloaming again & never far from home. Listen you hoots: alas for me, for my love with the gallant and grifter soul has tucked into just the crevice he feared. Fear told & tells him the truth, so he trusts it. Listen you hollers, whatever you had in mind for me.

Smoketrees line the roadside, still-bare beech and poplar bouqueted with redbud and something rusty I can't name, March's odd autumnals — One-church towns I'm glad not to be from, split-log strip mall with a porch where Claire's beauty shop shares a sign with "Antigues," where you study grace in magazines, and when dad dies you rename the family diner New York New York. Love is a means of travel, so you dye the linens pink and swan-fold napkins, holding peony in your mouth. Sundays drive out to watch the ferry drag its lace. Coastward, Easter-colored clapboard, the last generation's shanties hovering on narrow stilts above the velour drift of tide plain (mink from a distance, muskrat up close), a drowsy instrumental music, flooded at dusk. Beside the bridge, smooth brow of pewter. Island of saplings blackened like a framed-up house.

I want you to know how it felt to hold it, deep in the well of my eye. You, future person: star of one of my complicated dooms — This one’s called Back to the Dark. Scene 1: Death stampedes through the server-cities. Somehow we all end up living in caves, foraging in civic ruin. Banana Palace— the last of the last of my kind who can read breathes it hot into your doom-rimed ear. She’s a dowser of spine-broken books and loose paper the rest of your famishing band thinks mad. • Mine was the era of spending your time in town squares made out of air. You invented a face and moved it around, visited briefly with other faces. Thus we streamed down lit screens sharing pictures of animals looking ridiculous — trading portals to shoes, love, songs, news, somebody’s latest rabid cause: bosses, gluten, bacon, God — Information about information was the pollen we deposited — while in the real fields bees starved. Into this noise sailed Banana Palace. • It was a mother ship of gold. Shining out between happy bday katie ! and a photo of someone’s broken toe — Like luminous pillows cocked on a hinge, like a house with a heavy lid, a round house of platelets and honey — It was open, like a box that holds a ring. And inside, where the ring would be: • I think about you a lot, future person. How you will need all the books that were ever read when the screens and wires go dumb. Whatever you haven’t used for kindling or bedding. Whatever made it through the fuckcluster of bombs we launched accidentally, at the end of the era of feeling like no one was doing a thing about our complicated dooms — Helpless and braced we sat in dark spaces submerged in pools of projected images, trying to disappear into light — Light! There was so much light! It was hard to sleep. • Anyway. Banana Palace. Even now when I say it, cymbals shiver out in spheres. It starts to turn its yellow gears and opens like a clam. Revealing a fetal curl on its temple floor, bagged and sleeping — a white cocoon under lit strings that stretch from floor to ceiling — a harp made of glass incubating a covered • pearl — We broke the world you’re living in, future person. Maybe that was always our end: to break the jungles to get at the sugar, leave behind a waste of cane — There came a time I couldn’t look at trees without feeling elegiac — as if nature were already over, if you know what I mean. It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen. Cross-section of a banana under a microscope the caption read. I hunched around my little screen sharing a fruit no one could eat.

They are tall herbs, really, not trees, though they can shoot up thirty feet if all goes well for them. Cut in cross section they look like gigantic onions, multi-layered mysteries with ghostly hearts. Their leaves are made to be broken by the wind, if wind there be, but the crosswise tears they are built to expect do them no harm. Around the steady staff of the leafstalk the broken fronds flap in the breeze like brief forgotten flags, but these tattered, green, photosynthetic machines know how to grasp with their broken fingers the gold coins of light that give open air its shine. In hot, dry weather the fingers fold down to touch on each side-- a kind of prayer to clasp what damp they can against the too much light.

for Jane Draycott As winter secrets melt with the purple sun, what is revealed is electric — notes tune unknown scales, syntax alters tongues, terracotta melts white, banyan ribbons into armatures as branch-roots twist, meeting soil in a circle. Circuits glazed under cloth carry alphabets for a calligrapher’s nib italicised in invisible ink, letters never posted, cartographer’s map, uncharted — as phrases fold so do veils.

i must be careful about such things as these. the thin-grained oak.    the quiet grizzlies scared into the hills by the constant tracks squeezing in behind them closer in the snow.    the snared rigidity of the winter lake.    deer after deer crossing on the spines of fish who look up and stare with their eyes pressed to the ice.   in a sleep.  hearing the thin taps leading away to collapse like the bear in the high quiet.   i must be careful not to shake anything in too wild an elation.    not to jar the fragile mountains against the paper far- ness.   nor avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air. of the gentle wilderness i must set the precarious words.   like rocks.   without one snowcapped mistake.

for Colleen The cliff above where we stand is crumbling and up on the Palisades the sidewalks buckle like a broken conveyer belt. Art Deco palm trees sway their hula skirts in perfect unison against a backdrop of gorgeous blue, and for you I would try it, though I have always forbidden myself to write poems about the beach at sunset. All the clichés for it sputter like the first generation of neon, and what attracts me anyway are these four species of gulls we’ve identified, their bodies turned into the wind, and not one of them aware of their silly beauty. I’m the one awash in pastels and hoping to salvage the day, finally turning away from the last light on the western shore and the steady whoosh of waves driving in, drumming insistently like the undeniable data of the cancer in your breast. We walk back to the car and take the top down for the ride home through the early mist. No matter what else is happening, this is California. You’ll have your cancer at freeway speeds. I’ll drive and park and drive at park. The hospital when I arrive to visit will be catching the last rays of the sun, glinting like an architectural miracle realized. I realize a miracle is what you need— a grain of sand, a perfect world where you live beyond the facts of what your body has given you as the first taste of death.

first garden Beastgarden. second garden Bees go mad on late summer evenings, should People stray from their jobs towards water Beastgarden. third garden Who makes the rented red boat's Oars turn Who is the younger one always Turning up Who professes to be better because He is just looking Who says he is worse off as He cannot look Beastgarden. fourth garden The unicycle girl, thin Like one with a sexual problem, Goes through The Schlosspark. This follows: Father rolling his eyes Beastgarden. fifth garden The man from Manchester Has my breast in his hand These are funny They don't do anything do they Being burnt by a fire I say Beastgarden. sixth garden Similarly, if only You grasped some Titanic misery or a Love like an old man's Beastgarden. seventh garden Where were we A ballroom competition goes on A yellow satin bikini A fuchsia floor-length are Dancing; an audience is Drinking, clapping 1 2 3 1 2 3 Beastgarden.

The rat traps emptied, the grain troughs filled. The distance between sheep shed and my own ice-melt dripping on the mat equals the diameter of moonlight squared on his face as he looks up and finds me again. Says he’s sure I’d been swallowed by the elements, says he’d been about to come looking. I step into the warm. Two baas from out back where I’d worked. Two tufts of wool he lifts from my hair. In just such a manner are sleek blue words slyly acquired by a wispy whiter-than-snow page. He’s seen it happen. Seen a tear of mine, then two, well up and slip loose as the little boat of orgasm veers into the vortex.