1630 Nature poems

— after Lorca I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice. I want to learn to walk without blinking. I want to outlive the turtle and the turtle’s father, the stone. I want a mouth full of permissions and a pink glistening bud. If the wildflower and ant hill can return after sleeping each season, I want to walk out of this house wearing nothing but wind. I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with you weighing less than a chill. I want to fight off the bolts of gray lighting the alcoves and winding paths of your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgings of snow. I want to fight off the wind. I want to be the wind and I want to fight off the wind with its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging screen doors, its gilded boxes, and neatly folded pamphlets of noise. I want to fight off the dull straight lines of two by fours and endings, your disapprovals, your doubts and regulations, your carbon copies. If the locust can abandon its suit, I want a brand new name. I want the pepper’s fury and the salt’s tenderness. I want the virtue of the evening rain, but not its gossip. I want the moon’s intuition, but not its questions. I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter every room in a strange electrified city and find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror, but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch. I do not want to be the yellow photograph or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman, I want to be pure flame. I want to be your song.

and on the waves in turmoil in the harbor gulls floated like pieces of paper set adrift, little boat-like birds twirling in the wind-tossed waves that drove into the strong arms of the seawall at the apex of the bay where a statue of Sappho stands, young woman with a lyre—not looking out to sea but glancing at the curve of the seawall and the birds, those lost notes before rain

The length of the wind runs from mid-May to murder. The length of the wind runs from January through joy. The wind runs as long as the right hand’s first finger points to the sun after thunder. The wind gallops prayerward like a horse held in the palm of a rock, no taller than a knee bent for the sake of singing. The wind weighs more than the fossilized horse and stretches from fingernail to praise. The length of the wind runs from mid-May to mercy, January through justice. Unto the broken, dwelling in a broken, promised land, the wind drops a hammer and some are warmed and some are chilled and some laugh and some die. Silently through the nuclear physicist, the wind wicks loud as paper-scraps trailing in the wind’s wake, igniting an empiricist, fragrant through tallow. The wind strikes the wind like rice in a paddy. The wind scatters petals like blossoms of napalm. The wind snaps the backs of malnourished conquistadors bowed down to gold. It is the wind who estimates poverty in moments by the method of moments, who assesses want in units of amass. It is the wind who shakes America by the ovaries, runs the length of revolution, all the calories in a dollar. The length of the wind runts from mid-March to hunger. The length of the wind grunts from Saturday through sorrow. The wind flutters nothing but orgasms and afterplay. The wind numbers seminarians more numinous than semen. The wind is a mote on the wind. The wind is the dust that measures time in footsteps. The wind is the word in the throat of the dust. The length of the wind runs from midwife to marvel. The wind ribbons out within mid-May and mourning and dust is the voice the wind whickers glory, the wind whickers grief.

Skywind, skillful disorder, Strong tumult walking over there, Wondrous man, rowdy-sounding, World hero, with neither foot nor wing. Yeast in cloud loaves, you were thrown out Of sky’s pantry, with not one foot, How swiftly you run, and so well This moment above the high hill. Tell me, north wind of the cwm, Your route, reliable hymn. Over the lengths of the world you fly, Tonight, hill weather, please stay high, Ah man, go over Upper Aeron Be lovely and cool, stay in clear tune. Don’t hang about or let that maniac, Litigious Little Bow, hold you back, He’s poisonous. Society And its goods are closed to me. Thief of nests, though you winnow leaves No one accuses you, nor impedes You, no band of men, nor magistrate’s hand, Nor blue blade, nor flood, nor rain. Indeed, no son of man can kill you, Fire won’t burn nor treason harm you. You shall not drown, as you’re aware, You’re never stuck, you’re angle-less air. No need of swift horse to get about, Nor bridge over water, nor any boat. No officer or force will hand you over To court for fingering treetop feathers. Sight cannot see you, wide-open den, But thousands hear you, nest of great rain. You are God’s grace across the world, The roar when breaking tops of oaks are hurled, You hang clouds’ notes in heavens’ score And dance athletically over moors Dry-humored, clever creature, Over clouds’ stepping-stones you travel far, Archer on fields of snow up high, Disperser of rubbish piles in loud cries. Storm that’s stirring up the sea Randy surfer where land meets sea. Bold poet, rhyming snowdrifts you are, Sower, scatterer of leaves you are, Clown of peaks, you get off scot-free, Hurler of mad-masted, foaming sea. I was lost once I felt desire For Morfudd of the golden hair. A girl has caused my disgrace, Run up to her father’s house, Knock on the door, make him open To my messenger before the dawn, Find her if there’s any way, Give song to the voice of my sigh. You come from unsullied stars, Tell my noble, generous her: For as long as I’m alive I will be her loyal slave. My face without her’s a mess If it’s true she’s not been faithless. Go up high, see the one who’s white, Go down below, sky’s favorite. Go to Morfudd Llwyd the fair, Come back safe, wealth of the air. Translated from the Welsh

for Roger Caillois Water hollows stone, wind scatters water, stone stops the wind. Water, wind, stone. Wind carves stone, stone's a cup of water, water escapes and is wind. Stone, wind, water. Wind sings in its whirling, water murmurs going by, unmoving stone keeps still. Wind, water, stone. Each is another and no other: crossing and vanishing through their empty names: water, stone, wind.

From this height the sunset spans the whole world before me: houses and trees are shadows neon flares between them like sudden fire the freeways run, always strangely vacant with riderless cars empty air the windows up here refract the blue slate and rose light making the hills on the horizon collide with ideas of Sussex, piedmont or the cold clear wind of the Abruzzi but that is never what is out there. At home, the lamp curls its aurora into the corners of the room and out the windows squares, rectangles of light stake out a territory on the ragged lawn. In the center of things between the pressing of the window and air — a small space — there is a meeting that defines nothing, everything.

abide with me don’t ever abide gimme anytime a pile of leaf-hay across the field underneath the bright new blue tractor pulling the tedder which is the waffler or fluffer

The flowers I planted along my road Have lasted long despite winds and cold Already fiery noons begin to burn Slyly the secret of the roots And I know that of my footsteps nothing will remain But a trace a cluster a drop To recall along the paths I’ve chosen Those evening when the light sang In eyes hands hearts and goblets. I love the sweet harshness on the tongue Filling the palate with a promised saliva Knocking the mute keyboard of the teeth With raised draperies of which one might say That memory retains a fleeting trail of them Half-glimpsed we won’t know how or else The loud reminder of the single moment All gravity banished the unconscious pleasure recaptured Of being nothing but entirely animal. For our life closed on that iridescent sphere —Color taste perfume at their extreme limits—invokes Some miracle independent of its origin Produced by distilling air and earth— Like the move toward technological planets After a calculation made on the fingers of one hand— Time contained flowing—continual autumn This evening this wine that enters me to make My head light my tongue loose my cock happy.

At dawn wind out of the north, hailflecks, pebbly skates against windows. I lie thinking the drainspout’s drip comes again in the basement faucet where I am crying, a child betrayed by death’s new cardinal and the cat yawning on the porch where my grandmother found me. Risen now, I see the river full-bodied, its white wind-knotted hair swirling like hers. The polar hickory is naked as a saber recalled by a girl long gone in the gold sauce of apples. Two leaves that might be cardinals returned tumble in the hard light at the brick fence. Nothing moves in boxwood where gray soldiers lie. Among the last of them she walked, cupping apples, staining her white frock, who took a boy far back into the haze the Shenandoah hills held where family stallions might walk aimless ground littered with purpling flesh beyond the cull of seasons. Through a gate nailed with leather belts in my mind, I pass and enter the arthritic orchard tended by widows. What I gather wakes me to think how bright on the tongue was the taste kept concealed, sustained, of flesh abiding, months beneath the wintering house floors. To reach this I must go down storm-worn stones and pick my steps past the sealed boxes of family debris, nightgowns, flannels, ribbons, birthspoons, a pair of dulled skates, flowers pressed in a moldy Bible. Why is it we keep what we cannot bear to use, and can’t escape, shoving ourselves into shrunken rooms edged with old foolishness unforgiven and unforgotten? I fumble to the center and pull a yellow light down the ancient string still dependably there and stand, in my head, as she did, playfully asking where they went. I know, I know, I say back there in the dust where I’ve come again to look through tiny windows into skirts of boxwood, a morning that sends me alive among gray soldiers at the house roots. I see also blue preserving jars full of slick pulpy flesh she has put up in a juice thick as blood. Behind it all in dark eaves, baskets of apples, split pine boxes like generations steeping, undisturbed by the tick and groan of housepipes veining the overhead I leave. Oh let me see her light bring back those stallion-feeders, little red handfuls of joy! Look how long I’ve slept, learning to walk straight into a dawn-silvered web where secret spiders spin ceaseless as the seasons. Above me ice takes each room, I can hear feet pacing fretful halls, yet here I lift my face and puff back all the silk in the world. I hold every core peeled on this slab. My fingers claw the meat of family stillness, parting all the way to seeds. Oh widows of the air, fill me with your cidery, useless lying, those bladed hours you fed me the dark rotting dreams of your love.

A kind of Danish cow long thought to be extinct lumbers slowly from a fog-soaked forest. Past the statue of two men shaking hands on horseback. Into the trainyard with its newly brunette-colored coal cars. It is late, lamps light the trainyard. One of the trainmen sees the cow and has a thought like a small grey infant sinking ever so slowly in the icy harbor. The cow continues out the other side of the trainyard. The trainman shudders at the thought. The trainman’s cat Stamina crunches walnuts in her cat dish. Now, nearly thirty years later, ladies and gentlemen it is my great pleasure to introduce to you that very same cow. (The cow is led out onto the stage by a young boy dressed as a farmer.)