1630 Nature poems

Two wind chimes, one brass and prone to anger, one with the throat of an angel, swing from my porch eave, sing with the storm. Last year I lived five months under that shrill choir, boxing your house, crowding books into crates, from some pages your own voice crying. Some days the chimes raged. Some days they hung still. They fretted when I dug up the lily I gave you in April, blooming, strangely, in fall. Together, they scolded me when I counted pennies you left in each can, cup, and drawer, when I rechecked the closets for remnants of you. The last day, the house empty, resonant with space, the two chimes had nothing to toll for. I walked out, took them down, carried our mute spirits home.

In fresh snow that fell on old snow I see wild roses in bloom, springtime, an orchard of apple and peach trees in bloom, lovers of different preferences walking naked in new snow, not shivering, no illusion, no delusion, no bluebells. Why should I live by reality that murders? I wear a coat of hope and desire. I follow fallen maple leaves abducted by the wind. I declare I am a Not Quite, almost a nonentity. I fought for that “almost.” I lift up and button my collar of hope. I simply refuse to leave the universe. I’m all the aunts in my father’s house and all my uncles too. I had fifty great-great-grand-grandmothers who got to Paradise, like Enoch, without dying. Once my friends and I went out in deep paradise snow with Saint Bernards and Great Pyrenees to find those lost in the blizzard that God made for Himself because He prefers not seeing what happens on earth. With touch He can hear, taste, smell, see, and He has fourteen other senses there are no words for. Memory, He said, is a sense, not a power. Who am I to disagree with Him? There are some vegetarians among you, so I will tell you what He eats. It’s green, and cows and sheep eat it too. He picks His teeth. I think I heard Him say, “Gentlemen don’t void in swimming pools or the ocean. I like your dirty jokes, I prefer them in meter.” He told me to carry on. I thought “On” was a Norse god. He said, “No, it’s just a burden that gets heavier, the burden makes you stronger.” “Isn’t on the Japanese debt to ancestors?” I countered. He resents hearing the prayers and praise of sycophants. “How come you are speaking to me?” I asked. He speaks Silence, languages I call “Night” and “Day.” His politics? “Nations” to Him are “a form of masturbation.” Original blasphemy amuses Him, describes His coitus with living creatures, mothers, His self, a whale, a male praying mantis dying to mate. He likes to hear, “do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you.” Instead of a prayer rug, I stitch Him a pillow of false proverbs: “in the house of the hangman talk of rope.” I asked Him if I ever did anything he liked. “You planted eggplant too close to the cucumbers and they married. I blessed that wedding, sent roses by another name.” “How come you speak to me?” I asked. He said He was not speaking to me, “Consult Coleridge on the Imagination.” He waved, He did not say goodbye.

A branch, the hand of Apollo, The plane tree’s polished, broad bough, Spread above you, may it bring you The universe’s immortal peace. You’d meet me on the broad and shining shore Of Pylos, so I’d planned, With Mentor’s tall ship pulled up on the beach Snug in the sand. We would be bound, as those who sailed with the gods, In the winged friendship of youth, And would take our seats in the stone thrones that Time And custom had made smooth And meet that man who still in the third generation Reigned serene, a sage Whose tales of travels and holy decrees had ripened In his mind with age— At dawn, we’d attend the sacrifice to the gods, The ritual slaughters Of the three-year-old heifers, and hear the single cry That rose from his three daughters When the axe thwacked, and the black-fringed, slow-rolling eye Drowned in a swoon Of darkness, and the gilt horns were rendered idle, A hazy half moon. My love imagined you, as a sister her brother, In your virginal bath, How Polycaste rinsed your naked body and dressed you In a robe of fine cloth. I thought to prod you a little with my foot As dawn was about to break: The gleaming chariot’s yoked for us and ready. No time to lose! Awake!

My leaf blower lifted the blackbird— wings still spread, weightless, floating on the loud, electric wind almost as if it were alive. Three or four times it flew, but fell again, sideslipped down like a kite with no string, so I gave up. . . I had work to do, and when the dust I raised had settled in that other world under the rose bushes, the ants came back to finish theirs.

When the plowblade struck An old stump hiding under The soil like a beggar’s Rotten tooth, they swarmed up & Mister Jackson left the plow Wedged like a whaler’s harpoon. The horse was midnight Against dusk, tethered to somebody’s Pocketwatch.  He shivered, but not The way women shook their heads Before mirrors at the five & dime—a deeper connection To the low field’s evening star. He stood there, in tracechains, Lathered in froth, just Stopped by a great, goofy Calmness.  He whinnied Once, & then the whole Beautiful, blue-black sky Fell on his back.

Late, I have come to a parched land doubting my gift, if gift I have, the inspiration of water spilt, swallowed in the sand. To hear once more water trickle, to stand in a stretch of silence the divining pen twisting in the hand: sign of depths alluvial. Water owns no permanent shape, sags, is most itself descending; now, under the shadow of the idol, dry mouth and dry landscape. No rain falls with a refreshing sound to settle tubular in a well, elliptical in a bowl. No grape lusciously moulds it round. Clouds have no constant resemblance to anything, blown by a hot wind, flying mirages; the blue background, light constructions of chance. To hold back chaos I transformed amorphous mass—and fire and cloud— so that the agèd gods might dance and golden structures form. I should have built, plain brick on brick, a water tower. The sun flies on arid wastes, barren hells too warm and me with a hazel stick! Rivulets vanished in the dust long ago, great compositions vaporized, salt on the tongue so thick that drinking, still I thirst. Repeated desert, recurring drought, sometimes hearing water trickle, sometimes not, I, by doubting first, believe; believing, doubt.

With what deep murmurs through time’s silent stealth Doth thy transparent, cool, and wat’ry wealth Here flowing fall, And chide, and call, As if his liquid, loose retinue stay’d Ling’ring, and were of this steep place afraid; The common pass Where, clear as glass, All must descend Not to an end, But quicken’d by this deep and rocky grave, Rise to a longer course more bright and brave. Dear stream! dear bank, where often I Have sate and pleas’d my pensive eye, Why, since each drop of thy quick store Runs thither whence it flow’d before, Should poor souls fear a shade or night, Who came, sure, from a sea of light? Or since those drops are all sent back So sure to thee, that none doth lack, Why should frail flesh doubt any more That what God takes, he’ll not restore? O useful element and clear! My sacred wash and cleanser here, My first consigner unto those Fountains of life where the Lamb goes! What sublime truths and wholesome themes Lodge in thy mystical deep streams! Such as dull man can never find Unless that Spirit lead his mind Which first upon thy face did move, And hatch’d all with his quick’ning love. As this loud brook’s incessant fall In streaming rings restagnates all, Which reach by course the bank, and then Are no more seen, just so pass men. O my invisible estate, My glorious liberty, still late! Thou art the channel my soul seeks, Not this with cataracts and creeks.

A man with binoculars fixed a shape in the field and we stopped and saw the albino buck browsing in the oats—white dash on a page of green, flick of a blade cutting paint to canvas. It dipped its head and green effaced the white, bled onto the absence that the buck was—animal erasure. Head up again, its sugar legs pricked the turf, pink antler prongs brushed at flies. Here in a field was the imagined world made visible—a mythical beast filling its rumen with clover until all at once it startled, flagged its bright tail— auf Wiedersehen, surrender— and leapt away— a white tooth in the closing mouth of the woods.

more so than we did before, but now we know what to do with them. We hang our troubles on them and wipe our shoes against them. We go lethargic on the porch, we tear the bark with spindly fingers. We soak up the sun with restless hunger. So much sky we say in unison, where does it go, do we follow it? Do we let it get away? For months we splay without a fence, door wide open— blue and brash inside and out.Because we can, we keep saying,because we can. We face a lush sense of life that we have nothing to do with. We face our cravings and journey with a new kind, our new people; They all possess smiles and frowns, but more windswept expressions—no permanent downwardness of spirit, the way it was back east. And since we've left the city to be ourselves, we still must face our needy souls— full of want, compulsions. Were we proud of this? The way we turned away? But we've protected these habits, forgone others in return. What is the profession of the culture-hoarder? Who are the gatekeepers? Do we grace them with our backs? Moreover our chests remain empty yet seductively warmed, burning by the fire, our asses cold and exposed. All the wood, crisp birch to shield our lazy lobes, rounded bodies, our cerebrums and other parts. Are we awaiting cheerless ambivalence to greet us in the West? Cavernous and cloudless, unaffected by beauty. Let's be petulant, this is us now, we say. We can't help but find ourselves lustful; crying alligator tears with pails to our eyes,we didn't know we were here we kept saying,we don't know how it happened. We thought and thought, and finally we closed our doors on the trees to hide what we grew temperate for but resolve didn't find us, not alive with force,we flew out of their arms.

As sometimes, in the gentler months, the sun will return before the rain has altogether stopped and through this lightest of curtains the curve of it shines with a thousand inclinations and so close is the one to the one adjacent that you cannot tell where magenta for instance begins and where the all-but-magenta has ended and yet you’d never mistake the blues for red, so these two, the girl and the goddess, with their earth-bred, grass- fed, kettle-dyed wools, devised on their looms transitions so subtle no hand could trace nor eye discern their increments, yet the stories they told were perfectly clear. The gods in their heaven, the one proposed. The gods in heat, said the other. And ludicrous too, with their pinions and swansdown, fins and hooves, their shepherds’ crooks and pizzles. Till mingling with their darlings-for-a-day they made a progeny so motley it defied all sorting-out. It wasn’t the boasting brought Arachne all her sorrow nor even the knowing her craft so well. Once true and twice attested. It was simply the logic she’d already taught us how to read.