1630 Nature poems

Two horses were put together in the same paddock. Night and day. In the night and in the day wet from heat and the chill of the wind on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging and the taste of bay in the shadowed air. The dignity of being. They slept that way, knowing each other always. Withers quivering for a moment, fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail, width of back. The volume of them, and each other’s weight. Fences were nothing compared to that. People were nothing. They slept standing, their throats curved against the other’s rump. They breathed against each other, whinnied and stomped. There are things they did that I do not know. The privacy of them had a river in it. Had our universe in it. And the way its border looks back at us with its light. This was finally their freedom. The freedom an oak tree knows. That is built at night by stars.

Have you been in our wild west country? then You have often had to pass Its cabins lying like birds’ nests in The wild green prairie grass. Have you seen the women forget their wheels As they sat at the door to spin— Have you seen the darning fall away From their fingers worn and thin, As they asked you news of the villages Where they were used to be, Gay girls at work in the factories With their lovers gone to sea! Ah, have you thought of the bravery That no loud praise provokes— Of the tragedies acted in the lives Of poor, hard-working folks! Of the little more, and the little more Of hardship which they press Upon their own tired hands to make The toil for the children less: And not in vain; for many a lad Born to rough work and ways, Strips off his ragged coat, and makes Men clothe him with their praise.

A field of thistles, díscharging concentric waves of negative theology, on a mountainside, 2010, May 23rd (is Whitsuntide), would certainly suffice as a source of the ever-obtainable not enough sought state of subtle shock if he’d close this computer and walk up the summit road until the sea’s in view. And maybe in the southeast wind, in broadcast waveform data therein, microsystems stocks he has been checking, clicking all day like an addict gambler, will float up until red numbers cross the black horizon into green—two redtail hawks                                float up on a thermal— maybe even make some money while you’re up here— ask why is each second so charged with a feeling of living in freak Götterdämmerung days of live free radical notion or die into negative white on white sun pride burning away, but equally charged with utopian headlong longevity crowing— why can’t I be steady? Why is my only balance built of collisions and cancelings-out of such sharp spike-of-chaos moods? Field of thistles, red and green. Fields of dollars, thistles, solidi and yen and rand and rupees blowing off the curve of land.

You find yourself in a narrow bed you’ve never slept in, on a tree-lined grassy field you’ve never walked upon, on a cold toilet seat you have not sat on, in a place you now call your home, your learning, your future. Red stone pathways expose the buildings that will house the knowledge you seek, and the information you want to gather. You crane your neck to look up at the 13-story brick tower rising from the ground, looming over you as you walk past. The melodies and beats of different songs mix, create a sound of their own, flow from open windows. Crushed leeks Top Ramen noodles ground into a blue and speckled carpet attract armies of ants to the communal kitchen on the sixth floor. You pull your jacket tighter against your body, strong, salty wind whips off the Sound, and up the hill as you walk through Red Square toward the clatter of knives, forks and digesting bellies. Finally, you are released like a white dove from the hands of its owner, allowed to fly discovering your dreams, discovering what you are made of.

for William Kittredge 1. That woman still lives at her ranch. You can ask her. Maybe She knows. As near and far As the rest of us can tell The barn and sheds were built In the Great Depression. Someone Had money and a big idea. Far and away the biggest Idea I’ve ever seen. Pat says there must’ve been A hundred men, shepherds And shearers, working there. It’s one of those things That not only is, but seems, Larger inside than out, Like a planetarium or an orange, Even with Wyoming around it, And real stars flying away. Just stick your head in there; Its dark will make you dizzy. It has an underneath Too low to stand in unless You are a sheep. The loft Vaults like a dusky church. 2. All that summer I balanced water, Coaxing the desert Into pasture, With eight cubic feet Per second for two Thousand acres. Horseback, shovel On my shoulder along Miles of ditches: Stalling here, Releasing there, Water over The deepening green, Keeping it living: Herons and cranes Regal in meadows, Strings of ducklings Frothing the ditch To get away. 3. One day riding ditches I saw Clay. He was on the hill against the sky, Flapping his arms at me. They were going to bulldoze the corrals at the shearing sheds, Intricate maze of gates and pens Clay, as a kid, had built with his father, Before they lost their ranch, before Frank died, Before the family had to move away. The new owner was razing everything. I guess he had some kind of idea. Clay didn’t need any gates, but, as Pat said, That’s Clay. I met them at the shearing sheds. Pat held a wrecking bar like a steel snake. I just can’t stand tearin’ apart all them guys’s dreams, he said, looking shy. Hell is when you know where you are. 4. On the barn roof a loose piece of tin Flaps in the wind like a broken wing. Wyoming whirls in the sun. Up in the loft a pair of shears, Oh, fifty or sixty years forgotten there, Floats in noonlight, bearing up some dust, Just a pair of spring-steel scissors, Two knives joined at the hip, with smiling edges. An owl the color of things left alone Flaps out of the gable door. Hell is when you know where you are: Mazes of pens and gates dreaming sheep; Miles of ditches dreaming green. 5. No one living knows Who built the shearing sheds, Unless maybe that woman, And I’m not about to ask her, Ever since she tried To stab her husband with a pair of scissors. He was ninety-one And barely held her off. Later she claimed she was just Trying to cut his heart Medication out of his shirt Pocket — dope, she called it — And the old man had to leave The ranch, where he didn’t last long. They bulldozed the corrals. We got forty gates. We took them someplace safe. 6. Now the vast, dim barn floats like an ocean liner Whose doldrums are meadows spinning into brush, And everywhere you look Wyoming hurries off. All night the stars make their escape. In the loft a pair of shears cuts woolly moonlight. All day a piece of roofing slaps in the wind. A startled owl flaps out of the gable. Hell is when you know where you are and it’s beautiful. You saved the gates for nothing. You balanced the water to keep the green from spinning Away into sage, the same gray as the wing That just now shaded your eyes.

The Whale that wanders round the Pole Is not a table fish. You cannot bake or boil him whole, Nor serve him in a dish; But you may cut his blubber up And melt it down for oil, And so replace the colza bean (A product of the soil). These facts should all be noted down And ruminated on, By every boy in Oxford town Who wants to be a Don.

After three weeks of hot weather and drought, we've had a week of cold and rain, just the way it ought to be here in the north, in June, a fire going in the woodstove all day long, so you can go outside in the cold and rain anytime and smell the wood smoke in the air. This is the way I love it. This is why I came here almost fifty years ago. What is June anyway without cold and rain and a fire going in the stove all day?

The field is filled with what we see without sleep. Never completely closed, it quickly erodes when tilled before rain. If clogged with boulders it won’t be razed and once burdened cannot quicken under flocks. The field reveals glint and holds leaning, pulls twist from taut knots of buds. We watch the field for stirring, wait for stems to spring back from sparrows. We hope for a swell in its middle so we can say we saw the sway that comes from noticing. Water meanders to prairie potholes, throws cordgrass into switchbacks as we push past bramble and scare a whistling wheel of geese into air. The field draws hawks and sides of trains, cradles pools from storms where ducks plumb for water snails. We trample light between us, no way to lope in parting the swales. We must flatten to fill the space with all the rolling wrapped up in us. Before home, the gabled barn across the road throws the brightest rise we’ve ever seen the field try on. The field is not in rows, is not a faded saw-songed croon. It pushes green a mist above mud, shows how we make do. We wonder what we’re not in the field. What scours, cuts, or knocks. If we could stay and still feel full the low line rounding out a spread of subtle slope.

All these great barns out here in the outskirts, black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass. They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use. You say they look like arks after the sea’s dried up, I say they look like pirate ships, and I think of that walk in the valley where J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said, No. I believe in this connection we all have to nature, to each other, to the universe. And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there, low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss, and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets, woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so. So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky, its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name though we knew they were really just clouds— disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

As grains sort inside a schist An ancient woodland indicator called dark dog’s mercury River like liquid shale And white-tipped black lizard-turds on the blue wall For a loss that every other loss fits inside Picking a mole until it bleeds As the day heaves forward on faked determinations If it’s not all juxtaposition, she asked, what is the binding agent? Creepy always to want to pin words on “the emotional experience” Azure hoplia cockchafer, the caddisworm, the bee-louse, blister beetle, assassin bug The recriminations swarm around sunset When it was otherwise quiet all the way around You who were given a life, what did you make of it?