1630 Nature poems

The butterfly was there before any human art was made. Before cathedrals rose in prayer, the butterfly was there. Before pyramids pierced the air or Great Wall stones were laid, the butterfly was there. Before any human, art was made.

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field. The dark wheat listens. Be still. Now. There they are, the moon's young, trying Their wings. Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone Wholly, into the air. I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe Or move. I listen. The wheat leans back toward its own darkness, And I lean toward mine.

Here again at the edge of what was, the river held back by the stones it has carried, the knife in your hand brimming rain. Inside this day without beginning or end, it cannot stand still inside you. One day I'll leave—not you but all this—this hunger that pushes each wave.

Openly, yes, With the naturalness Of the hippopotamus or the alligator When it climbs out on the bank to experience the Sun, I do these Things which I do, which please No one but myself.  Now I breathe and now I am sub- Merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object In view was a Renaissance; shall I say The contrary?  The sediment of the river which Encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used To it, it may Remain there; do away With it and I am myself done away with, for the Patina of circumstance can but enrich what was There to begin With.  This elephant skin Which I inhabit, fibered over like the shell of The coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light Can filter—cut Into checkers by rut Upon rut of unpreventable experience— It is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the Hairy toed.  Black But beautiful, my back Is full of the history of power.  Of power?  What Is powerful and what is not?  My soul shall never Be cut into By a wooden spear; through- Out childhood to the present time, the unity of Life and death has been expressed by the circumference Described by my Trunk; nevertheless, I Perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after All; and I am on my guard; external poise, it Has its centre Well nurtured—we know Where—in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where ? My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of The wind.  I see And I hear, unlike the Wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made To see and not to see; to hear and not to hear, That tree trunk without Roots, accustomed to shout Its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact By who knows what strange pressure of the  atmosphere; that Spiritual Brother to the coral Plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light Becomes a nebulous green.  The I of each is to The I of each, A kind of fretful speech Which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is? Black earth preceded by a tendril?  It is to that Phenomenon The above formation, Translucent like the atmosphere—a cortex merely— That on which darts cannot strike decisively the first Time, a substance Needful as an instance Of the indestructibility of matter; it Has looked at the electricity and at the earth- Quake and is still Here; the name means thick.  Will Depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no Beautiful element of unreason under it?

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries, Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly, A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes Ebon in the hedges, fat With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers. I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me. They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides. Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks— Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky. Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting. I do not think the sea will appear at all. The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within. I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies, Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen. The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven. One more hook, and the berries and bushes end. The only thing to come now is the sea. From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me, Slapping its phantom laundry in my face. These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt. I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

The holes have almost left the sky and the blanks the paths—the patches next to natural, corroborated by the incidental sounds of practical activities and crows, themselves exhibiting many of the earmarks of the actual. This must have happened many times before, we must suppose. Almost a pulse if we could speed it up: the repeated seeking of our several senses toward each other, fibers trying to reach across the gap as fast as possible, following a blast.

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.

I teach my friend, a fisherman gone blind, to cast true left, right or center and how far between lily pads and the fallen cedar. Darkness is precious, how long will darkness last? Our bait, worms, have no professors, they live in darkness, can be taught fear of light. Cut into threes even sixes they live separate lives, recoil from light. He tells me, “I am seldom blind when I dream, morning is anthracite, I play blind man’s bluff, I cannot find myself, my shoe, the sink, tell time, but that’s spilled milk and ink, the lost and found  I cannot find. I can tell the difference between a mollusk and a whelk, a grieving liar and a lemon rind.” Laughing, he says, “I still hope the worm will turn, pink, lank, and warm, dined out on apples of good fortune. Books have a faintly legible smell. Divorced from the sun, I am a kind of bachelor henpecked by the night. Sometimes I use my darkness well— in the overcast and sunlight of my mind. I can still wink, sing, my eyes are songs.” Darkness is precious, how long will darkness last? He could not fish, he could not walk, he fell in his own feces. He wept. He died where he fell. The power of beauty to right all wrongs is hard for me to sell.

How they woke, finally, in a bed of ferns — horsetail ferns. How they died singing. All night, meanwhile, as if somehow the fox’s mouth that so much of this life has amounted to had briefly unshut itself — and the moth that’s trapped there, unharmed, gone free — a snow fell; the snow-filled street seemed a toppled column, like the one in the mind called doubt, or that other one, persuasion, the broken one, in three clean pieces    ...    Well, it’s morning, now. Out back, the bamboo bows and stiffens. Thoughts in a wind. Thoughts like (but nobody saying it): Nobody, I think, knows me better by now than you do. Or like: The bamboo, bowing, stiffening, seems like nothing so much as, in this light, competing forms of betrayal that, given time, must surely cancel each other out, close your eyes; patience; wait. Maybe less the foliage than the promise of it. Less that shame exists, maybe, than that the world keeps saying it does,know it, hold on tight to it, as if the world were rumor, how every rumor rings true, lately. When I’m ashamed, I make a point of reminding myself what is shame but to have shown — to have let it show — that variety of love that goes hand in hand with having wished to please and, in pleasing, for a while belong. So shame can, like love, be an eventual way through? There’s a minor chord sparrows make with doves that’s not the usual business — it’s not sad at all, any of it: this always waiting for what I’ve always waited for; this not being able to assign to what’s missing some shape, a name; this body neither antlered nor hooved — brave too, this body, unapologetic    ...

Half  awake, I was imagining a friend’s young lover, her ash blonde hair, the smooth taut skin of  twenty. I imagined her short legs and dimpled knees. The door scraped open, but eyes closed, I saw nothing. The mattress sagged. She laid her head on my chest, and murmured love against my throat, almost humming, approaching song, so palpable I could hold her only chastely, if  this was chaste. I couldn’t move my hand even to caress her freckled shoulder. So this is how imagination works, I thought, sadly. And when at last she spoke, she spoke with the amused voice of my wife, my wife who was at work but also here, pleased at the confusion she was causing. This is a lesson about flesh, isn’t it? I asked.Blowfly, she whispered on my throat as we made tense, pensive love.Blowfly, blowfly.