1630 Nature poems

From a microlight, the Owens River, cut and siphoned to an aqueduct: a corridor through banks of trees, into scuffed desert dunes, mountains scaling to the right, to the left dry veins in the valley, saline and pink, the water channeled slowly through scatch grass, under dirt tracks and fences, twenty miles, thirty — black line turning silver in midday sun, dipping beneath the roar of Route 395 into the shade of the alkaline hills. It zigzags past farms, arcs around quarries, swipes the bar code of a glinting new town, the alien discs of pivot irrigation growing sunflowers, roses, and corn. Then follows the highway, just after Big Pine, rejoins the river north of Fish Springs, is diverted again, south of the reservoir — And does water care, if it’s river or aqueduct? Its vessel curved concrete, but the same constant flow, gunneling south, hugging the contours of eastern Sierra, past Independence, the airport, the golf course, along the right hand of Owens’ dry lake bed, red swirling dust clouds kept down by sprinklers. From up in the air the twin Haiwee Reservoir is knuckle and knee joint where the line disappears — becomes pipeline and conduit under the desert, punching for groundwater, surfacing riveted over Mojave, two hundred miles on from its native cradle, gray zombie spring tracing through forest to Santa Clarita, the treatment plant: the last reserve and loud cascades above the lights and life of Los Angeles.

1 One man held the huge pig down and the other stuck an ice pick into the jugular, which is when we started to pay attention. The blood rose ten feet with force while the sow swam on its back as if to cut its own neck. Its fatty back smacked the slippery cement while the assassins shuffled to keep their balance, and the bloody fountain rose and fell back and rose less and less high, until the red plume reentered the pig at the neck, and the belly collapsed and the pig face went dull. 2 I knew the pig was the butcher’s, whose game lived mainly behind our garage. Sometimes turkeys, always roosters and sheep. Once the windmill turned two days without stopping. The butcher would walk in his apron straight for the victim. The others would scratch and babble and get in the way. Then the butcher would lead the animal to the back door of his shop, stopping to kill it on a stump. It was always evening, after closing. The sea breeze would be rising, cloaking the hour in brine. 3 The pig we saw slaughtered was more than twice anything shut up in the patch we trespassed to make havoc. Since the butcher was Italian, not Jewish, that would be his pig. Like the barber who carried a cigar box of bets to the stationery store, like the Greek who made sweets and hid Greek illegals, immigrant “submarines,” the butcher had a business, his business, by which he took from our hands the cleaver and serrated knife for the guts, and gave us back in butcher paper and outer layers of brown wrapping our lives for their cries. 4 Hung up to drain, the great pig, hacked into portions, looked like a puzzle we could put together in the freezer to make a picture of a pig of course, a map, clothes or other things when we looked.

When it snows, he stands at the back door or wanders around the house to each window in turn and watches the weather like a lover. O farm boy, I waited years for you to look at me that way. Now we’re old enough to stop waiting for random looks or touches or words, so I find myself watching you watching the weather, and we wait together to discover whatever the sky might bring.

Often the slightest gesture is most telling, As when he reaches tenderly in passing To pluck the yellow leaf from the dark fall Of her hair, or even the absence of all gesture: The way she doesn’t need to turn to know Who, in this gathering of friends, has touched her. It was as if he dreamed some private garden. Perhaps he woke from it, mid-reach, to find His hand too near her hair in this crowded yard, And maybe even now she’s shuttering in (She’s even better than you or I at that) A storm of worry and recrimination— Did anyone notice? how could he do that here!— By seamlessly continuing to tell you About her trip to see her favorite Vermeer This morning in the Delft show at the Met: “So now they say she isn’t weighing pearls Or gold or anything—it’s just the light Gleaming off empty scales.” So much is hard To know for sure. If I confronted her, She’d say it was just a leaf—who could afford To disagree? Could we? Now she’s explaining How the girl faces a mirror we can’t see into And how behind her hangs a gloomy painting Of the Last Judgment: “Over her head God Floats in a cloud,” she says, “like a thought balloon.” But you don’t hear. You’re watching me. I nod.

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.