1630 Nature poems

Like all his people he felt at home in the forest. The silence beneath great trees, the dimness there, The distant high rustling of foliage, the clumps Of fern like little green fountains, patches of sunlight, Patches of moss and lichen, the occasional Undergrowth of hazel and holly, was he aware Of all this? On the contrary his unawareness Was a kind of gratification, a sense of comfort And repose even in the strain of running day After day. He had been aware of the prairies. He had known he hated the sky so vast, the wind Roaring in the grasses, and the brightness that Hurt his eyes. Now he hated nothing; nor could he Feel anything but the urgency that compelled him Onward continually. "May I not forget, may I Not forget," he said to himself over and over. When he saw three ravens rise on their awkward Wings from the forest floor perhaps seventy-five Ells ahead of him, he said, "Three ravens," And immediately forgot them. "May I not forget," He said, and repeated again in his mind the exact Words he had memorized, the message that was Important and depressing, which made him feel Worry and happiness at the same time, a peculiar Elation. At last he came to his people far In the darkness. He smiled and spoke his words, And he looked intently into their eyes gleaming In firelight. He cried when they cried. No rest For his lungs. He flinched and lay down while they Began to kill him with clubs and heavy stones.

Light from the ugliest lamp I ever saw, here on the table that triples for reading, eating (can’t say dining), business on the phone; ugliest except a few around the corner in that guest house at windows —plaster driftwood; cylinders like rockets or sanitary napkins propping shades; thin torso of a youth; red globe on orange globe, the works,somebody’s collection. Wouldn’t she love this one, lump of lamp base intending landscape, two donkeys in mustard glaze, heads ruefully down, one carrying two rush panniers large enough to hold your pens or salts and peppers; on the other a shifty man with droopy moustache rides, ** grumping under his sombrero; right leg broken off at the knee, left leg clipped at ankle. They make no progress, this mold-made work—the joins, arthritic ridges where dabs of grayish green suggest a wizened bush from which a brass post rises to hold a shade that doesn’t fit and twice has tried to burn, as crusty sores at the rim show. Still, it lights my work. Why hate it? Do I care? These indecorous furnishings stand for failure, are a clutter that weighs down, defeats the purpose, like dumbbells taken along on vacations; the pen jar; lamp base, sextant, portable folding triptych. ** The writing table fills with clutter. Specials coax me to nudge buying into play. A checkout coupon lets me get some brand of lunch meats fifty-five cents off if I spend two dollars but I just can’t find it when I’m shopping, the ticket— with its rubric of good news and inscrutable forest of bar code, black on red—to lead me on; back home there it is, on the table, laying waste my power to spend. What I have wanted (with Larkin) to do must be “essentially undoable, it belongs to the imagination.” Rather, the demolition has begun, piss and shit and blood mix in the snow-white bowl; and yet ** I find the Beech Forest (behind the beach dunes) that Allen recommended “without reservation.” The man was right—it more than satisfies, these beech ponds and their dune forest. I sat on a pitch pine that had blown over and then turned round and risen again, and bowed part making a seat something like a saddle; the tree was growing while I sat on it as were the other pitch pines round the pond ruddy in afternoon, late light of day, rough trunks with tufts of twisted branches green with needles, it was idyllic, wind speaking through the pines, ** solitude:—O, yes, two high-breasted girls came striding by, I heard them coming, I heard them going, yammering at full volume not looking left or right, they passed me, were out of sight and soon of earshot, Doppler effect caused by exuberant youth in oblivious chitchat. And people are smoking in these dry woods too, not policing their butts is how I know, the butts will surface from the heavier, sifting sand, sand spilling, surfing down hills, crashing in waves over the path here. But call it solitude, when a thought—but wait! I thought—I should not be ** having a thought here, this moment: yet a vision of a Chinese poet in his study overlooking such a pond as this arrives out of the silence like the yellow water lilies on the water, pads spreading out in files like a design on the broadloom of a lobby. The sage is working on a poem, brushing it on silk, inspired by a blend of Tao and Confucius. Doubtless he would not forget allusions to Sung poets, if he were not a Sung poet himself, in which case he would have to echo Han or T’ang; and he would be writing of solitude; time passing; absent friends ** (enlightenment would have to be inferred). No matter, I didn’t bring a pen today. However, over there are inkberry bushes, so with a reed I just might make a start. . . . Farther on the path I listen to a bird, a warbler perhaps, I do not know the song or see the bird. There with the pines and sand and birdsong, and no prayer- or guide- or selfhelp-book, no serious commune, the mind must yearn to be led on; it wants a deity, an altar to approach; an altar at least to take steps toward; occasion to rise to—with nothing planned for the mind, ** it’s like a person suddenly blind, not blind for a long time and knowing the ropes, but just now, rope-stung, blind—and groping, feeling around for the way, any way, or, closer to home, when the power goes at night just getting from here to there even though you know the drill, —you never find the batteries when you need them, groping down cellar for the circuit breaker then you flip it; nothing, it’s a bigger failure you are part of— know the layout in general yet without ceremony the mind leans forward, over an edge, hoping for, needing a little ritual, like a guide rail to keep it ** from falling, going down. Even then the mind finds need of other news, keeps on desiring alterity somewhere at hand. For example, walking the streets of Provincetown, nothing to see but lots to look at, all that fluff and buff, the Michelin-man day-trippers aching along; suddenly I want a prayer book, maybe not Bottles and Stools or The Little Red Book but still . . . even a pocket copy of A Shropshire Lad, such as I find soon after all the buff and fluff at Tim’s, the only bookstore on the street, handy for quick reads. Thin as a shortbread biscuit, ** THE RICHARDS PRESS LONDON 1915, no doubt with its khaki cover, intended for some Tommy’s backpack, a backward solace for off-duty hours in the trenches: admittedly not very much on the other hand just the thing I’m talking after; a talisman perhaps is all, an amulet with words that say,buck up, come on, you’ll make it, there’s something on after all this, no matter what the words say. Housman’s “vision,” his drear anguish of love for someone, something, lad and landscape that never were, that might shoot threads of gold among the bloody muslins and the mud; ** mind wants other news than what the ruffled senses bring data of—smoke or flesh or birdsong. It saw there was a space within, reserved for turning toward another; other; that no bullet, arrowwood or beach plum might fill, though these could occupy that space a moment. Again I heard the casual chirping of that bird, off in that tupelo, the song I did not know, below the cries of gull and jay I did. The unknown I saw was not enough to satisfy; or—satisfied when it was framed, complement of what is known for sure. ** It’s—like—when you go someplace strange, new, the seashore, any boundary, you want to learn the names of plants. Start looking at the edges of leaves. It gives a grip on where you are, and who, or seems to, to know bullbrier, bearberry, blueberry. You get a GUIDE or a local to tell. On the dune path I found one, a gnarled bush alone, hollylike but succulent leaf; nothing like it in the book. But why feel helped in nature by a name? When a horde of flower children wanted to know what they should do to be saved (back when) Snyder told them, “learn the names of plants; of animals; learn to do something with your hands.” ** Well I went out to that dune again: to cop a copy of the leaf I took and lost: so it’s only bayberry after all; dioecious, two-sexed: some leaves different from others, that’s OK only one got pictured in my book; but the waxiness, bayberry for sure, set to be rendered into candles for a gifte shoppe, nauseating noose of “scents.” Its nutlets twinkle near the oily leaves aglow above the sand, bone white. Doesn’t make me feel better to know now about that scrawny straggler. Sanctimonious pilgrim know-alls, Bradford & Co.! Forest into desert, just like that. No time flat, considering.

the noun A disease of the peach tree —a fungus distorts leaves. The first time I was taken to see him I was five or six. A vesicle on the skin containing serum, caused by friction, a burn, or other injury. He lived on Alabama Street next to Saint Peter’s and wore a white t-shirt, starched and snug. A similar swelling with fluid or air on the surface of a plant, or metal after cooling or the sunless area between one’s toes after a very long walk. Don’t ask me how it is I ended up holding it. An outer covering fitted to a vessel to protect against torpedoes, mines, or to improve stability. My guess is that he brought it out to show me thinking, perhaps, I had never seen one up close, let alone felt the blunt weight of one in my hands. A rounded compartment protruding from the body of a plane. What came next: no image but sensation of its hammer (my inexpert manipulation) digging into but not breaking skin—the spot at the base of my thumb balloons, slowly filling with fluid… In Spanish: ampolla —an Ampul of chrystal in the Middle Ages could be a relic containing the blood of someone holy. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t loaded.

back 90 suns to a run through the ferns I remain the eclipse of each sound as I push through the soil to the icons that run no more. my stutters explode through the shade of the twilight as crows destroy the machine → robots drone in the infinite zero, where we dwell in the pull of the Sea. the moon shaves our brain onto the plate and layers the first person far before the book to form the semblance we share in the animals who dwell in the exterior layer of our souls beyond the skin. that is where suffering plants and holds its fractal flower as hope delivers its other linked body made of the sand and the wind. the flora and fauna and others of the earth, of each person extend their net of the mind to reduce the numerical coldness of the sound. but where do the multiple hearts plant themselves in the exterior organs and the bodies of the stones? and of time cut down to the green and the stop of the harvest where the singular falls, how does it start? and where does it go?

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.