1630 Nature poems

One morning you open one eye and listing to the south it bulks like a barn, noiseless, derelict planks horizontal and deeply grooved. A rudder the size of your front door pivots as you push. Once inside you can smell the fear of every winged, creeping and four-legged thing: no water, no straw, just shadow and bare wood. Where is the one promised to wake beside you forever? Ox-eyed daisies, goldenrod, clover— why are you breathing among them, why don't you gather the outcast beasts or become one...

The heart of a bear is a cloud-shuttered mountain. The heart of a mountain’s a kiln. The white heart of a moth has nineteen white chambers. The heart of a swan is a swan. The heart of a wasp is a prick of plush. The heart of a skunk is a mink. The heart of an owl is part blood and part chalice. The fey mouse heart rides a dawdy dust-cart. The heart of a kestrel hides a house wren at nest. The heart of lark is a czar. The heart of a scorpion is swidden and spark. The heart of a shark is a gear. Listen and tell, thrums the grave heart of humans. Listen well love, for it’s pitch dark down here.

I have been known to birth a mountain whole, a range of them in my belly, I popped them out one by one. The blood-cut son born black, I could not believe the wholeness of him, the crushed diamond of his face. And then the other, who flew from me, a shooting star; a twin mirror girl, whose orchid face opened and opened and opened. There were more of them, one born of water, one of fire, one for every element. But now my mountain days are done. The red night clouds, the afterbirth, the snail shell whorls of them. The unborns we named: Beinn Narnain, Ben Vane, Beinn Ime, Ben Vorlich, and Beinn Bhuidhe

I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, so swiftly it flew, the sight Could not follow it in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For who has sight so keen and strong, That it can follow the flight of song? Long, long afterward, in an oak I found the arrow, still unbroke; And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.

Where two streams joined, we met By accident, sitting upon an outcropping of rock With only the intent of watching Water flow beneath unwinding water. Facing up-stream, she held a flower To the sun as I leaned back and found An arrowhead inside a crevice, which lay there As if someone had left it by intent As an excuse for me to speak above the whirl of water Swirling upon stone and thus Transform the accident of meeting her— Ablaze in sunlight with a flower in her hand— Into stark fact as obdurate as rock. Could I have called, "Look at this arrowhead I just found here!" Would she have thought "An accident, that's credible," Or feared that my intent was sinister, And that the implication of the arrowhead, Unlike the radiant white flower or The two streams merging into faster water, Casting up colored spume, Had been contrived by me, certain as rock That forms by geologic laws? She had to know an arrowhead Is humanly designed with the intent to kill, Though now it's harmless as a flower Decorating someone's hair, Or water organized into a garden fountain. An arrowhead can now be used As an adornment for a necklace Like a flower in a painting where a stream Leaps past a light-reflecting rock With nothing in a brush-stroke left to accident. And so our accidental meeting on the rock Flowed by, a flower cast upon the water With intent unknown, and all That's left now is the arrowhead.

seventy wingbeats per second vagaries of vegetation, rosy anticipation I turn the page without reading essence of accident what is the strongest motive what drives the solar wind time’s not so old, dating only from the creation New England has cooled significantly, icy core with a sooty coating this ice hard to break—the brain will have to wait catharsis of the vulture, obligatory vespers a bat, painted the color of joy, head downward because the brain is heavy I put on music but don’t always listen whether magma could rise to where tones reach audible frequencies modest success with a late parasitic moth we will soon find out if all this is true sudden drain on the heart, more doubt, the big melt: anything gone is replaced

The mower alone saw from the median the cloud come over the mountain down to trawl the valley like a whale and the swifts like water passing through her white baleen. The mower alone patrolling the haw with the hawks saw from the median the cloud come over the mountain to swallow where the sky had been and where the town had been pinned by steeples and hummed electric hubris. For everyone else on either side of the narrow the cloud was only a minute of a single verse because the highway treats the blues as all the same as if Bentonia were Sunflower County but the land between the lanes even while under the blades sees the power in every cloud and hears each song spiral out of an old familiar tune just so to devour our hearts.

What will survive us has already begun Oak galls Two termites’ curious self-perpetuating bodies Letting the light through the gaps They lay out their allegiances under the roots of an overturned tree Almost always better to build than to wreck You can build in a wreck Under the roots of an overturned tree Consider the martin that hefts herself over traffic cones Consider her shadow misaligned over parking-lot cement Saran Wrap scrap in her beak Nothing lasts forever not even the future we want The President has never owned the rain

A lapwing somersaults spring flips over winter and back. After a fast walk up long hills, my limbs the engine of  thought, where burn bubbles into beck and clough to gill, beneath a sandstone cliff  balanced on a bed of shale and held from hurtling by Scots pine that brush a scrubby sky with cloud snow scutters, I found a place to sit by snapping watta smacking rocks and wondered — how would it be for you? And so, alone, un-alone even, in my anger, bring you here.

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there's a barrel that I didn't fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. Magnified apples appear and disappear, Stem end and blossom end, And every fleck of russet showing clear. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. And I keep hearing from the cellar bin The rumbling sound Of load on load of apples coming in. For I have had too much Of apple-picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. For all That struck the earth, No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, Went surely to the cider-apple heap As of no worth. One can see what will trouble This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it's like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep.