1630 Nature poems

I do better in animal time, a creeping dawn, slow ticking toward dusk. In the middle of the day on the Nebraska prairie, I’m unnerved by subdued sounds, as if listening through water, even the high-pitched drone of the cicadas faint; the blackbirds half-heartedly singing. As newlyweds, my parents drove cross country to Death Valley, last leg of their escape from New York, the thick soups of their immigrant mothers, generations of superstitions that squeezed them from all sides. They camped under stars that meant no harm. It was the silence that alerted them to danger. They climbed back into their tiny new car, locked its doors and blinked their eyes until daylight.

I love these raw moist dawns with a thousand birds you hear but can't quite see in the mist. My old alien body is a foreigner struggling to get into another country. The loon call makes me shiver. Back at the cabin I see a book and am not quite sure what that is.

There might be the quibble of birds and the swag Of a river and a distantly belled Altar of animals, softly spoken; Certainly cattail, sumac, and fern Would rise from the marshes nearby, revealed In forms too perfect to envy trees— Not trying for larger and larger keepsakes. Cryptic and subtle green, hedgerows Hiding mysterious deer, the start Of a rabbit, as if towers and clouds Had suddenly shadowed an open field— These would be the events of the day, Life having narrowed down to please Natural hungers and thirsts, the grass Thick at our feet, and, above our heads, The stars, their fireworks anemones. What shall I say of the house? Or you? Only industrious ghosts would know How lazily cropping up the view Would make the impossible possible; Nothing but weekdays would blankly graze On time’s oblivious pastures, free At last of motive and thought, and we, Becoming ourselves so naturally, Would never say, looking up at the sky, Another life is shining in the sky.

I was on the porch pinching back the lobelia like trimming a great blue head of hair. We’d just planted the near field, the far one the day before. I’d never seen it so clear, so gusty, so overcast, so clear, so calm. They say pearls must be worn or they lose their luster, and that morning I happened to remember, so I put them on for milking, finding some sympathy, I guess, between the two. Usually I don’t sit down until much later in the day. The lobelia was curling in the sun. One by one birds flew off, and that should have been a sign. Trust is made and broken. I hardly sit down at all. It was the time of year for luna moths, but we hadn’t had any yet settling on the porch or hovering above the garden I’d let the wild rose take.

To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth, the sky must seem a miracle. I’d commit the scene to black and white if I could, the sky bright and bottomless, trees gnarled as the knees of elephants. Helpless in his Biltrite pram, Ansel Adams is watching the clouds roll in. Then the clouds would gather speed, roll out again, and the camera pan down to Ansel Adams the man kneeling on granite, choosing one filter over another. It’s as though more and greater apparatus were needed to recapture that first exposure, says the voice-over: as though Ansel Adams were a pioneer toiling after the spirit, not just the body, of America. To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth, the sky must seem a matter of fact. It’s the mind beneath he wants to grasp, stowed in its smart black enclosure. I’d have his pram gather speed and transform, a cartoon robot against the heavens, wheels spinning, into Ansel Adams’ camera. Now the bright black sky is Ansel Adams and Ansel Adams the filter; light renders each tree a bouquet of paper; the Great Depression gathers like so much weather. To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth, the sky is what it is, taut with its isness. Some time before dawn, the section framed by interior blackens and brightens and each tree out there glows with itself, with the certainty of all Ansel Adams’ aspens. No one is watching but this one bewildered immigrant, toiling after sleep, saturated in monochrome. Sometimes it’s all you’ll find in the wilderness: Ansel Adams, tiny in his pram, composing the day just gone.

Like nights we knelt on the dirt floor of a dugout, leaned our heads back, eyes twitching gone, and popped nitrous canisters into the communion shapes of our mouths, slipped inside where everything seemed to be falling snow, ice, the time split between chasing flies through a darkened park and sprawling in sycamore bark—how clean that abyss we drifted in, like dew, more like pollen, on our skins; and, beneath, a want for touch, a kiss, a return. Like nothing back then, to break an arm latching on to the bumper of an Impala, or settling back as the car took us as far as the salted bridge, before letting the ride go with a mitten caught behind the chrome waving from the other side of the river.Like this, you said, sliding a needle, watching dope plunge, the body's rush and tow until you felt something like an angel hovering above, but it was only pigeon feathers deviling the air. Those friends are gone: some dead, dying, locked up or jailed in themselves; and when I see some kids running in the heat of a taillight swirling behind them, I remember we wanted only to quiet our bodies, their unnatural hum, a vague pull inward, some thin furrows gliding over the snow.

The humble sense of being alive under the towering sun fills the nectary and ripens apricots down to the last one, if Mnemosyne wakens from apathy each moment. It is the soft burly sound of a bee tumbled in fritillary, is it not? But if memory, as if to illustrate the mind was not yours to have, the mind was not given, fails us, leaving us in our underpants in the garden, should we not hate the garden, or the woman whose garden it is? And sunlight. Thunder. Rain. Hardened in heart against what earth compels and seizes, goddamning, goddamned rain.

One evening in winter when nothing has been enough, when the days are too short, the nights too long and cheerless, the secret and docile buds of the apple blossoms begin their quick ascent to light. Night after interminable night the sugars pucker and swell into green slips, green silks. And just as you find yourself at the end of winter’s long, cold rope, the blossoms open like pink thimbles and that black dollop of shine called bumblebee stumbles in.

Bashō, with your grass pillow, what underground sounds come into your dreams? Do blue-horned beetles scratch against the starless night sky that lines your head with the starless night skies of their own domed backs? Do centipedes trickle through? Do worms burrow with their snouts, with their bodies that are entirely snouts? Snoozer, I can only ask you this because now you are dead asleep: Do I ever appear as a nightcrawler whispering in your ear? Are the words, “I love you,” as soft as the cough of a good luck cricket? Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones .

‘Oh! sister, he is so swift and tall, Though I want the ride, he will spoil it all, For, when he sets out, he will let me fall, And give me a bump, I know! Mamma, what was it I heard you say, About the world’s hobbies, the other day, How some would get on and gallop away, To end with an overthrow?’ ‘I said, little prattler, the world was a race, That many would mount with a smile on the face, And ride to their ruin, or fall in disgrace: That him, who was deaf to fear, And did not look our for a rein or a guide, His courser might cast on the highway side, In the mud, rocks and brambles, to end his ride, Perchance with a sight and a tear!’ ‘Oh! sister, sister! I fear to try; For Brutus’s back is so live and high! It creeps at my touch – and he winks his eye— I’m sure he is going to jump! Come! dear mother, tell us some more About the world’s ride, as you did before, Who helped it up – and all how it bore The fall, and got over the bump!’