1630 Nature poems

Oh, good gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth, This autumn morning! How he sets his bones To bask i’ the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet For the ripple to run over in its mirth; Listening the while, where on the heap of stones The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet. That is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true; Such is life’s trial, as old earth smiles and knows. If you loved only what were worth your love, Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you: Make the low nature better by your throes! Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!

“Oh where are you going with your love-locks flowing On the west wind blowing along this valley track?” “The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye, We shall escape the uphill by never turning back.” So they two went together in glowing August weather, The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right; And dear she was to dote on, her swift feet seemed to float on The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight. “Oh what is that in heaven where gray cloud-flakes are seven, Where blackest clouds hang riven just at the rainy skirt?” “Oh that’s a meteor sent us, a message dumb, portentous, An undeciphered solemn signal of help or hurt.” “Oh what is that glides quickly where velvet flowers grow thickly, Their scent comes rich and sickly?”—“A scaled and hooded worm.” “Oh what’s that in the hollow, so pale I quake to follow?” “Oh that’s a thin dead body which waits the eternal term.” “Turn again, O my sweetest,—turn again, false and fleetest: This beaten way thou beatest I fear is hell’s own track.” “Nay, too steep for hill-mounting; nay, too late for cost-counting: This downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.”

at first they recce, easy, around the edge of  breath then gathered gangs unleash and breach but the wind has no objective, riding the slope of my roof

Touch swollen tonsils: gill slits. Inside eyelid: slimelight. Cheek: shark. Here foreknown I’ve dived down dawnless microbial snows, phosphor blue to blue- black, to black. I fend fish. I find the saffron curb of   the sulfur vent, veering voiceless again into the segmented, swaying, white, toothed tube- worm, Time.

The star dissolved in evening—the one star The silently and night O soon now, soon And still the light now and still now the large Relinquishing and through the pools of blue Still, still the swallows and a wind now and the tree Gathering darkness: I was small. I lay Beside my mother on the grass, and sleep Came— slow hooves and dripping with the dark The velvet muzzles, the white feet that move In a dream water and O soon now soon Sleep and the night. And I was not afraid. Her hand lay over mine. Her fingers knew Darkness,—and sleep—the silent lands, the far Far off of morning where I should awake.

from Sonnets, Second Series XVIII And Change, with hurried hand, has swept these scenes: The woods have fallen; across the meadow-lot The hunter’s trail and trap-path is forgot; And fire has drunk the swamps of evergreens! Yet for a moment let my fancy plant These autumn hills again,—the wild dove’s haunt, The wild deer’s walk. In golden umbrage shut, The Indian river runs, Quonecktacut! Here, but a lifetime back, where falls to-night Behind the curtained pane a sheltered light On buds of rose, or vase of violet Aloft upon the marble mantel set,— Here, in the forest-heart, hung blackening The wolf-bait on the bush beside the spring.

For Barry Silesky Catalpas blooming up and down Catalpa Street, car alarms blooming up and down Waveland Avenue—an instant of nature without the narrative. O face-in-your-morning-juice, swimmer-in-an-old-wool-suit, we sit side by side on the steps smoking the same cigarette, watching children who live alone, women married to the wrong men. Here is your little dog roaming the alley. What will he do for love this time? The gauchos sing: “The silver lights of stars hurl themselves against the open pampas of Clark Street” O tomato-in-a-woman’s-palm, one millisecond following the next millisecond, “Heal thyself,” the poem says, “Pick up your beggar’s mat and walk.” You hurl yourself into traffic. You talk to cops and street thugs; they smile at their smartphones.  They strut in the sun like jackals after a kill. And the gauchos sing: “Everyone will finally leave you, fugitive.” A cloud of pigeons cuts through the smog. Everyone will finally leave you. When the bus comes we sing like sailors. A red sky presses you to its lips. I tell you that everything has already been written. You say on a long, difficult pilgrimage Basho wrote on his hat.

The sea and a crescent strip of beach Show between the service station and a deserted shack A creek drains thru the beach Forming a ditch There is a discarded super-market cart in the ditch That beach is the edge of a nation There is something like shouting along the highway A California shouting On the long fast highway over the California mountains Point Pedro Its distant life It is impossible the world should be either good or bad If its colors are beautiful or if they are not beautiful If parts of it taste good or if no parts of it taste good It is as remarkable in one case as the other As against this We have suffered fear, we know something of fear And of humiliation mounting to horror The world above the edge of the foxhole belongs to the flying bullets, leaden superbeings For the men grovelling in the foxhole danger, danger in being drawn to them These little dumps The poem is about them Our hearts are twisted In dead men’s pride Dead men crowd us Lean over us In the emplacements The skull spins Empty of subject The hollow ego Flinching from the war’s huge air Tho we are delivery boys and bartenders We will choke on each other Minds may crack But not for what is discovered Unless that everyone knew And kept silent Our minds are split To seek the danger out From among the miserable soldiers

i.m. And then the sun came slicing sideways, clear water reflecting it, giving it slant. A gloss of rain so quick and light that day hardly made a sound. The thought of sheets hung out and drying on the line, of seeds in soil and soil itself, the glutting ends of stems of leaves that will them to let fall up and out and through the trees, the shape that shoots could take, of you and this moment as it happens: our echoing hush as we try to hold the close music of the blackbird in the bush. • And then the sun continued on. Lough Neagh cooled under the firm keels of fishing boats on the water’s taut skin, their painted hulls in pointed arcs an emblem of balance so finely wrought that they could tell the weight of light or air. Each night we walk along the shore, expecting still to find your sturdy figure waist-deep in waders, plumbing darkness, hauling it in, but never again your grip on the reel and never again the deft music of the blackbird nesting in your hand.

when it pushes shadow from the trees and presses it from their needles outside the Dye House and the bus is dark inside     when it picks apart the lawn and you are here will you soften me?      for the sun will you deflect it? I am blinking in the atrium    the library I don’t know if you have a room for me or where on me you can lie down but I want my anger easily exhausted the way fact takes the rug from an argument we both go on the floor I do feel your shade your wavy boughs   you dream you are leaving me I would become an ordinary person if you did but you are awake   and I am ordinary anyway and it pushes through me