1630 Nature poems

For E.B. The sprig of unknown bloom you sent last fall spent the long winter drying on my wall, mounted on black. But it had turned to fluff some months ago. Tonight I took it down because I thought that I had had enough of staring at it. Brittle, dry and brown, it seemed to speak too plainly of a waste of friendship, forced to flower, culled in haste. So, after months of fearing to walk past in case the stir should scatter it to bits, I took it out to scatter it at last with my own breath, and so to call us quits.

ephemeral as tinkerbell unmoored yet not unmoved tossed cloudward, flipped sans volition into the flow going but not wanting to go without the other flotsam

As through marble or the lining of certain fish split open and scooped clean, this is the blue vein that rides, where the flesh is even whiter than the rest of her, the splayed thighs mother forgets, busy struggling for command over bones: her own, those of the chaise longue, all equally uncooperative, and there’s the wind, too. This is her hair, gone from white to blue in the air. This is the black, shot with blue, of my dark daddy’s knuckles, that do not change, ever. Which is to say they are no more pale in anger than at rest, or when, as I imagine them now, they follow the same two fingers he has always used to make the rim of every empty blue glass in the house sing. Always, the same blue-to-black sorrow no black surface can entirely hide. Under the night, somewhere between the white that is nothing so much as blue, and the black that is, finally; nothing, I am the man neither of you remembers. Shielding, in the half-dark, the blue eyes I sometimes forget I don’t have. Pulling my own stoop- shouldered kind of blues across paper. Apparently misinformed about the rumored stuff of dreams: everywhere I inquired, I was told look for blue.

As if the sky during its emergence —when it bubbled its way up out of the sand, cooled and then sublimed into vapor that blued the dank grey of the atmosphere— left a residue of cobalt behind to remind from where it had sprung into existence, the water rising from this spring appears unearthly, as only things close to earth, born of earth, can: its blue deeper than the heart of a sapphire. Today, when faced with such a spectacle, we have, as usual, only two choices: the paralysis of awe, or the quick nonchalance of acceptance. But what about the Spaniards who came upon this spring before there was a platform lined with inner tubes, before there were wooden walkways elevated to slow their impending rot, before their was a faux beach, its sand stolen from the spring’s center? Did they run in with their clothes on convinced that this was the fountain of youth? Did they laugh believing themselves drunk, mad, asleep—dead, maybe? That afternoon, late summer, we did not swim, chose instead to wander out to the edge of the walkway, not a word between the two of us, only the wind. Unlike us mere mortals, the trees had long since been impressed, preferring, instead, to maintain postures incompatible with the work of sycophants.

The fern in the rain breathes the silver message. Stay, lie low. Play your dark reeds and relearn the beauty of absorption. There is nothing beyond the rotten log covered with leaves and needles. Forget the light emerging with its golden wick. Raise your face to the water-laden frond. A thousand blossoms will fall into your arms.

In inaccurate skin, among hologram trees, fresh from the tundra of dreams, I hear public television say that Jesus was trilingual. Billie Holiday sings the loss of plotliness, the loss of onomatopoeiabreath. Doris asks if I’ll touch her titanium humerus—I do. I go to Sheboygan to stand in Emery Blagdon's "The Healing Machine," which was brought in pieces from the Nebraska Plains. Its coffee can klieg lights' grace and copper wire sculptures leave burns all over me. Death is like Russia: beautiful, cold, expansive, expensive. Ephesus says: even marble turns to chalk. Aldebaran is nearing the end of its life. Jupiter and the moon are the closest they'll be until 2026. It's 25-below wind chill. Winds push iced piers into houses. My wounds smell like strawberries. Jim who once saw a UFO and was too tired to tell anyone, who rode a tiger, and slept with his cornet's mouthpiece stenciled on his lips, was a lifelong Indiana water garden gang member, Jim who delivered a baby from my body, Jim, impresario of poems, parking tickets, and sky-blue hydrangeas, Jim who "wore a crown of snow," Jim's ashes change the garden. Who can sleep with banded Jupiter so close to the moon?

Strange to remember a visit, really not so Long ago, which now seems, finally, past.   Always, it’s a Kind of obvious thing I guess, amazed by that Cycle: that first you anticipate a thing & it seems Far off, the distance has a weight you can feel Hanging on you, & then it’s there – that Point – whatever – which, now, while It’s happening seems to be constantly slipping away, “Like the sand through your fingers in an old movie,” until You can only look back on it, & yet you’re still there, staring At your thoughts in the window of the fire you find yourself before. We’ve gone over this a thousand times: & here again, combing that Same section of beach or inseam for that – I’m no Longer sure when or exactly where – “& yet” the peering, Unrewarding as it is,in terms of tangible results, Seems so necessary. Hope, which is, after all, no more than a splint of thought Projected outwards, “looking to catch” some where– What can I say here? – that the ease or Difficulty of such memories doesn’t preclude “That harsher necessity” of going on always in A new place, under different circumstances: & yet we don’t seem to have changed, it’s As if these years that have gone by are All a matter of record, “but if the real Facts were known” we were still reeling from What seems to have just happened, but which, “By the accountant’s keeping” occurred years. Ago.Years ago. It hardly seems possible, So little, really, has happened. We shore ourselves hour by hour In anticipation that soon there will be Nothing to do.   “Pack a sandwich & let’s eat later.”   And of course, The anticipation is quite appropriate, accounting, For the most part, for whatever activity We do manage.    Eternally buzzing over the time, Unable to live in it… “Maybe if we go upaways we can get a better View.”   But, of course, in that sense, views don’t Improve.   “In the present moment” (if we could only see It, which is to say, to begin with, stop looking with Such anticipation) what is enfolding before us puts to Rest any necessity for “progression”. So, more of these tracings, as if by some magic Of the phonetic properties of these squiggles…   Or Does that only mystify the “power” of “presence" which Is, as well, a sort of postponement.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself;myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Loot my point of view, hove my heart free from its hived booth though I know your smoke, its black blossom, is a substance I’ll never become: colors of plaster and grass I’ve prepped flawlessly, rivers I’ve whittled thin. It’s a personal matter to me, the wind. But let it be our cathedral feeling: a sculpture of ash dragging its robe over the hills because of us, because of me. Yellow is hurried, but red moves like a swarm through toothpick homes, pans over roofs, where the ethos we child from the ground will blacken to ruin. Let’s glory this roughened nap of landscape, this parched Arcadia, with one nude-struck match and a breeze.

A grainy predawn dark, early Expressway traffic bleeding arterial tail lights across gray water and its blue heart. Under Lemon Hill, grunts from Boathouse Row, woodshop clunks, young men’s voices too loud for a day exhaling into starless skies, bad boys after keg night, hungover, push long sculls into the water and slice its marcelled run, a marbled peacock wake behind each stroke and coxswain counting that muscled steadiness past the Water Works, Spring Garden Street Bridge then Girard Avenue Bridge, where on the bank Eakins sketches Max Schmitt in a single scull, his light like this, tinfoil blue, where the crews sweat off last night’s lost time but won’t row too far north to river canals, Manayunk Reach, its towpath, mules and barges and anthracite from Point Carbon to feed stoves and Bessemers in Harrisburg, Pittsburgh