1630 Nature poems

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?

A crown of handmade nails, as though there were a house here once, burned, where we’ve gardened for fifteen years; the ceramic top of an ancient fuse; this spring the tiny head of a plastic doll— not much compared to what they find in England, where every now and then a coin of the Roman emperors, Severus or Constantius, works its way up, but something, as though nothing we’ve ever touched wants to stay in the earth, the patient artifacts waiting, having been lost or cast away, as though they couldn’t bear the parting, or because they are the only messengers from lives that were important once, waiting for the power of the frost to move them to the mercy of our hands.

Today I saw the word written on the poplar leaves. It was

The Moon's a little prairie-dog. He shivers through the night. He sits upon his hill and cries For fear that I will bite. The Sun's a broncho.   He's afraid Like every other thing, And trembles morning, noon and night Lest I should spring and sting.

I. Only now, in spring, can the place be named: tulip poplar, daffodil, crab apple, dogwood, budding pink-green, white-green, yellow on my knowing.   All winter I was lost. Fall, I found myself here, with no texture my fingers know.   Then, worse, the white longing that downed us deep three months.   No flower heat. That was winter.   But now, in spring, the buds flock our trees.   Ten million exquisite buds, tiny and loud, flaring their petalled wings, bellowing from ashen branches vibrant keys, the chords of spring’s triumph: fisted heart, dogwood; grail, poplar; wine spray, crab apple. The song is drink, is color.   Come.   Now.   Taste. II. The song is drink, is color.   Come now, taste what the world has to offer.   When you eat you will know that music comes in guises— bold of crepe myrtle, sweet of daffodil— beyond sound, guises they never told you could be true.   And they aren’t.   Except they are so real now, this spring, you know them, taste them. Green as kale, the songs of spring, bright as wine, the music.   Faces of this season grin with clobbering wantonness—see the smiles open on each branch?—until you, too, smile. Wide carnival of color, carnival of scent.   We’re all lurching down streets, drunk now from the poplar’s grail.   Wine spray: crab apple. III. From the poplar’s grail, wine spray.   Crab apple brightens jealously to compete.   But by the crab apple’s deep stain, the tulip tree learns modesty.   Only blush, poplar learns, lightly.   Never burn such a dark-hued fire to the core.   Tulip poplar wants herself light under leaf, never, like crab apple, heavy under tart fruit.   Never laden. So the poplar pours just a hint of wine in her cup, while the crab apple, wild one, acts as if her body were a fountain. She would pour wine onto you, just let her. Shameless, she plants herself, and delivers, down anyone’s street, bright invitations. IV. Down anyone’s street-bright invitations. Suck ‘em.   Swallow ‘em.   Eat them whole.   That’s right, be greedy about it.   The brightness calls and you follow because you want to taste, because you want to be welcomed inside the code of that color: red for thirst; green for hunger; pink, a kiss; and white, stain me now.   Soil me with touching.   Is that right? No?   That’s not, you say, what you meant.   Not what you meant at all?   Pardon.   Excuse me, please. Your hand was reaching, tugging at this shirt of flowers and I thought, I guess I thought you were hungry for something beautiful. Come now.   The brightness here might fill you up. V. Come.   Now the brightness here might fill you up, but tomorrow?   Who can know what the next day will bring.   It is like that, here, in spring. Four days ago, the dogwood was a fist in protest.   Now look.   Even she unfurls to the pleasure of the season.   Don’t be ashamed of yourself.   Don’t be.    This happens to us all.   We have thrown back the blanket. We’re naked and we’ve grown to love ourselves. I tell you, do not be ashamed.   Who is more wanton than the dancing crepe myrtle? Is she ashamed?   Why, even the dogwood, that righteous tree of God’s, is full of lust exploding into brightness every spring. VI. Exploding into brightness every spring, I draw you close.   I wonder, do you know how long I’ve wanted to be here?   Each year you grasp me, lift me, carry me inside. Glee is the body of the daffodil reaching tubed fingers through the day, feeling her own trumpeted passion choiring air with hot, colored song.   This is a texture I love.   This is life.   And, too, you love me, inhale my whole being every spring.   Gone winter, heavy clod whose icy body fell into my bed.   I must leave you, but I’ll wait through heat, fall, freeze to hear you cry: Daffodils are up.   My God, what beauty! VII. Daffodils are up, my God!   What beauty concerted down on us last night.   And if I sleep again, I’ll wake to a louder blossoming, the symphony smashing down hothouse walls, and into the world: music. Something like the birds’ return, each morning’s crescendo rising toward its brightest pitch, colors unfurling, petals alluring. The song, the color, the rising ecstasy of spring.   My God.   This beauty.   This, this is what I’ve hoped for.   All my life is here in the unnamed core—dogwood, daffodil, tulip poplar, crab apple, crepe myrtle— only now, in spring, can the place be named.

They flared on the sea green of the Subaru that seemed netted under the unleafing maple, a limestone moulage cut from a quarry and cast in immemorial arrest behind Pete’s Absolute Asphalt truck, throttling still when I alighted and said, besides, in Aleppo once — to nothing but the wind photographed in sunlight; the pavement’s watery brier and children and their ghosts and the air-raid screams of mothers, once, in Aleppo, altered that moment in history when titihihihihi titihihihihi those white houses, stiffened with silence, broke the private change, the public good to dive into pits of leaves.

When in Wisconsin where I once had time the flyway swans came whistling to the rotten Green Bay ice and stayed, not feeding, four days, maybe five, I shouted and threw stones to see them fly. Blue herons followed, or came first. I shot a bittern’s wing off with my gun. For that my wife could cry. My neighbor’s wife mistook the spawning frogs for wood ducks nesting the white pines up on Bean Hill: I straightway set her right. Each April, on the first rainy night I lantern-hunt for salamanders where they hide, toewalking the bottom mucks and muds. I shudder at the scored skin of their sides, the deep flesh tucks. In hand, they dry. I walk in frogspawn jellies on my lawns. One time I hoped the great white birds might brake for the frog ditch and alight, but all the addled past falls in on itself, splash rings close inward on the rising stone, my gun sucks fire, the bone becomes whole bone, light narrows back on point and filament, the forest turns to sand, and only season lacking source rolls round and round, till I in my turns fall forever back clutching my stone, my gun, my light. When in Wisconsin where I once had time and spring beasts gorged my marrows and my tongue, I was not blind: the red eft clambered in my eye.