1630 Nature poems

Wind and the sound of wind— across the bay a chainsaw revs and stalls. I've come here to write, but instead I've been thinking about my father, who, in his last year, after his surgery, told my mother he wasn't sorry—that he'd cried when the other woman left him, that his time with her had made him happier than anything he'd ever done. And my mother, who'd cooked and cleaned for him all those years, cared for him after his heart attack, could not understand why he liked the other woman more than her, but he did. And she told me that after he died she never went to visit his grave—not once. You think you know them, these creatures robed in your parents' skins. Well, you don't. Any more than you know what the pines want from the wind, if the lake's content with this pale smear of sunset, if the loon calls for its mate, or for another.

I have sat here happy in the gardens, Watching the still pool and the reeds And the dark clouds Which the wind of the upper air Tore like the green leafy boughs Of the divers-hued trees of late summer; But though I greatly delight In these and the water-lilies, That which sets me nighest to weeping Is the rose and white color of the smooth flag-stones, And the pale yellow grasses Among them.

Since it’s just me here I’ve found the back and stayed there most of the time, in rain and snow and the no-moon nights, dodging the front I used to put up like a yard gussied and groomed, all edged and flower-lined, my bottled life. Uncorked, I had a thought: I want the want I dreamed of wanting once, a quarter cup of sneak-peek at what prowls in the back, at what sings in the wet rag space behind the garage, back where the rabbits nest, where I smell something soupish, sour and dank and it’s filled with weeds like rough cat tongues and the wind is unfostered, untended, now that it’s just me here and I am so hungry for the song that grows tall like a weed grows, and grows. When I was a little girl my ma said a woman gets tired and sick of the front yard, of kissing the backside of a rose.

Ten below, high of zero, 4:11pm flashed the alarm panel’s handsome blue touchscreen. Without commotion or fire the afternoon passed slowly, full of promise, then disappointment. Without heartbreak or break-in. For company I had Kafka on my lap and Qolsys vibrating lightly against the wall. 4:34...4:35... There are all sorts of creatures in the world, I read, wretched, limited, dumb creatures who have no language but mechanical cries

The canyon walls close in again, slant light a silver glare in brown water. The water is only knee deep, but when the boy reaches the boulders— purple dark, silvered by the smash of brute water— water will tear at his chest and arms. The walls of the canyon are brilliant in late light. They would have glared red and gold for his drowned camera: splashed blood to his left, to his right a wall of sun laddered with boulders. More than boulders.    Some stranger once fought down this cliffside, his rope of twisted dry vines strung boulder to boulder, clifftop to arroyo.    Escape.    Escape maybe.    Maybe bones in the desert. I think of hands scuffed raw from the braiding. Almost….  Water froths over the boulders, tugs at the boy’s footing.       Almost…. The blood cliff to his left blinds him.    Blind nails scrape at two boulders, a torn vine whipping somewhere above him. He wedges knees against polished rock, pressing up, clawing slick stone. Now.    Rope cutting his hand, he skids underwater: silver and froth, a film of bright blood staining his eyes. But he drags hand over hand up out of the water, climbing the sun hand over hand, the ancient vines holding, boulders for foothold, up out of that canyon.

When the wind clipped the whitecaps, and the flags came down before they shredded, we knew it was no nor’easter. The Blue Nose ferry stayed on course, west out of Yarmouth, while 100 miles of fog on the Bay blew away. The Captain let us stand on the starboard bridge and scan a jagged range. Shearwaters skimmed the peaks while storm petrels hunted valleys that slowly filled with gold. Alberto blew out in the Atlantic. We came back to earth that for days might tip and sway and cast us back to sea.

I woke from a bird hitting the window, almost, I thought, hard enough to break it. The sun rose knowingly. I slid the sash up and stuck my head out like someone in an Italian movie. A flicker lay on its back—stunned—but it was blinking steady as a railroad crossing. Was there misery to put out? Would it come to its "senses"? I thought where were you when bark beetles killed half my trees? Then I remembered, sleepily, reading that flickers mostly eat ants. I went back to sleep for half an hour, and dreamed, as I often do, of horses. When next I looked, the bird still lay still, still blinking. Maybe, I thought, it can't roll over. So I went down and rolled it over. Terrified by my touch, it came to life and flop- hopped down the hill into some sagebrush. It didn't fly, but it didn't seem broken, either. I tried to find it later. No luck. Whether it lived and flew off, or died thrust into a bush, was, apparently, none of my business. If it were thrust into a bush, I knew the ants wouldn't wait for the guest of honor to start dinner.

...and a decrepit handful of trees. —Aleksandr Pushkin And I matured in peace born of command, in the nursery of the infant century, and the voice of man was never dear to me, but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand. The burdock and the nettle I preferred, but best of all the silver willow tree. Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams; it lived here all my life, obligingly. I have outlived it now, and with surprise. There stands the stump; with foreign voices other willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies, and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.

Because someone thirsty enough to trust Old Testament wisdom followed the deepening greens and found a spring, silver in the shadow of blue ridges, I can kneel beneath this spill of willow limbs a century later and drink water risen from roots to enter the evening through a spout, the way Cherokee stories say the first people were born, washing into the world of such trees whose bark, like the water I cup to my parched mouth, tastes leafy and sweet and has the power, the old ones say, to heal.

Not a remarkable wind. So when the bistro’s patio umbrella blew suddenly free and pitched into the middle of the road, it put a stop to the afternoon. Something white and amazing was blocking the way. A waiter in a clean apron appeared, not quite certain, shielding his eyes, wary of our rumbling engines. He knelt in the hot road, making two figures in white, one leaning over the sprawled, broken shape of the other, creaturely, great-winged, and now so carefully gathered in.