1630 Nature poems

as the meat within the shell as the shell before the caw a bleached weed a fig dusted to sweet the skin egg albumen of peacock butterfly held to the ivory of oxen hoof pulling the space between sins                    I am as I am so the host                             on the tongue God of Bread complexion of conquest the salt of Lot as God is a crown of thorn diadem of wheat so am I the echo calling fossil back to name amaranth ash                    spread across the light

while the black oak takes coaxing. That popping and whistling? Yellow birch and red pine. Difference might for now define, but soon the whole church is chanting at the same time, flame splashing bright from the dirty bucket of the earthly, roaring likeness and only likeness into the bottomless cool of the night . . .

Arborvitae It rises in a Champaign County bog Amid bedstraw and skunk cabbage, Rises out there in an ice age River valley gorged with glacial till, And swills the moraine-filtered rainwater With the wafer ash and honeysuckle. Stalwart, set apart, and biblical — As if one of that ancient company That gave its coniferous canonical body To the tent that shuttled God Through the wilderness. • They say that cedar and cypress Are the protectors of  bones. You see them from the freeway, standing alone, Statuesque and serious, In the dead middle of and vigilant In beanfields, where farmers used to plant Their families. • Who are you like in your greatness? Consider a cedar of Lebanon, with fair boughs And forest shade, and of great height, Its top among the clouds.

In winter all the singing is in the tops of the trees where the wind-bird with its white eyes shoves and pushes among the branches. Like any of us he wants to go to sleep, but he's restless— he has an idea, and slowly it unfolds from under his beating wings as long as he stays awake. But his big, round music, after all, is too breathy to last. So, it's over. In the pine-crown he makes his nest, he's done all he can. I don't know the name of this bird, I only imagine his glittering beak tucked in a white wing while the clouds— which he has summoned from the north— which he has taught to be mild, and silent— thicken, and begin to fall into the world below like stars, or the feathers of some unimaginable bird that loves us, that is asleep now, and silent— that has turned itself into snow.

Prone on the northern water, That laps him about the breast, Like the Sphinx in the sand, forever The giant lies in rest. The sails drive swift before him, And the surf beats at his lip, But the gray eyes look out seaward Noting nor wave nor ship. The centuries drift over, He marks not with smile nor frown, Drift over him cloud and sea-gull, Swallow and thistledown. I, of the race that passes, Quick with its hope and its fear, Lean on his brow and question, Plead at his senseless ear: “What of thy past unmeasured? And what of the peoples gone? What of the sea’s first singing? What of the primal dawn? “What was the weird that bowed thee? How did the struggle cease? Out of what Titan anguish Issued thy hopeless peace?” Nothing the pale lips utter, What hath been, nor what shall be; Under the brow’s stern shadow, The gray eyes look to sea. The blue glows round and over, Thin-veiled, as it were God’s face; I feel the breath, the spirit, That knows nor time nor space. And my heart grieves for the giant In his pitiful repose, Mocked by the vagrant gladness Of a laggard brier-rose; Mocked to his face from seaward By the flash and whirl of wings; Mocked from the grass above him, By life that creeps and sings. I care not for his wisdom, His secret unconfessed; I yearn toward rose and cricket, Ephemeral and blest. Ah! if he might, how would he Quicken to love and to tears; For my immortal minute Barter his endless years! He rests on the restless water, And I on the grasses brown, Drift over us cloud and sea-gull, Swallow and thistledown.

The white train emerges from a dark curtain of tall fir trees with its coat of light snow. The white train appears as though newly escaped from the jaws of night. The white train steams out of the forest into the clear white meadow, melting the fresh snow around it. The trees are towering. Ancient giants. A whole section seems to have been logged. Over there the folded arms of soldiers who gather in small groups. We cannot see leaders or individual faces. Horsemen far away. On their way to the revolution perhaps. In the dining car, behind the velvet curtains— blood puddings and sea pie, clear soups and small marrow. Already today the chef has cooked three luncheons while crossing Poland; the starched waiters managed without spilling a drop. Dozens of dirty white napkins heap on hampers like miniature Alps threatening to fall. But now the train has braked and stopped. Small boys fog the windows with their warm breath as they watch the soldiers with silver sabers who order everyone off the train, into the new snow.

Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you: But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through. Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by.

And then I thought, Can I have more of this, would it be possible for every day to be a greater awakening: more light, more light, your face on the pillow with the sleep creases rudely fragmenting it, hair so stiff from paint and sheet rock it feels like the dirty short hank of mane I used to grab on Dandy’s neck before he hauled me up and forward, white flanks flecked green with shit and the satin of his dander, the livingness, the warmth of all that blood just under the skin and in the long, thick muscle of the neck— He was smarter than most of the children I went to school with. He knew how to stand with just the crescent of his hoof along a boot toe and press, incrementally, his whole weight down. The pain so surprising when it came, its iron intention sheathed in stealth, the decisive sudden twisting of his leg until the hoof pinned one’s foot completely to the ground, we’d have to beat and beat him with a brush to push him off, that hot insistence with its large horse eye trained deliberately on us, to watch— Like us, he knew how to announce through violence how he didn’t hunger, didn’t want despite our practiced ministrations: too young not to try to empathize with this cunning: this thing that was and was not human we must respect for itself and not our imagination of it: I loved him because I could not love him anymore in the ways I’d taught myself, watching the slim bodies of teenagers guide their geldings in figure eights around the ring as if they were one body, one fluid motion of electric understanding I would never feel working its way through fingers to the bit: this thing had a name, a need, a personality; it possessed an indifference that gave me logic and a measure: I too might stop wanting the hand placed on back or shoulder and never feel the desired response. I loved the horse for the pain it could imagine and inflict on me, the sudden jerking of head away from halter, the tentative nose inspecting first before it might decide to relent and eat. I loved what was not slave or instinct, that when you turn to me it is a choice, it is always a choice to imagine pleasure might be blended, one warmth bleeding into another as the future bleeds into the past, more light, more light, your hand against my shoulder, the image of the one who taught me disobedience is the first right of being alive.

Sometimes the rain shines Just when the sun reigns, And that was the way it is Beyond those French doors That late afternoon here In this mind’s early evening Where they still fade in That cool color Polaroid, Pastel shades of her prom dress, A bowl of double peonies, Promising, precocious, Trying, trying to open. • Their friend and he were tight Tight-rope walkers, self-taught Taut-trope-talkers, stalking Jamb-up, arm-in-arm And caroling to lucky stars Their bars and rebars, The night a carousel Of tryst and troth, Of casual carousals, Cocky arousals, Pitching the dark to the dark. (Streetlight and moth, Reader, she married both.) • But then there he was, In the morning’s mourning, Soi-disant Proustian mignon, Aesthetic ascetic And Kansas rube Reducing his thought To a bouillon cube That no one hot Ought ever pore over.

Often in summer, on a tarred bridge plank standing, Or downstream between willows, a safe Ophelia drifting In a rented boat — I had seen them come and go, Those wild bees swift as tigers, their gauze wings a-glitter In passionless industry, clustering black at the crevice Of a rotten cabbage tree, where their hive was hidden low. But never strolled too near. Till one half-cloudy evening Of ripe January, my friends and I Came, gloved and masked to the eyes like plundering desperadoes, To smoke them out. Quiet beside the stagnant river We trod wet grasses down, hearing the crickets chitter And waiting for light to drain from the wounded sky. Before we reached the hive their sentries saw us And sprang invisible through the darkening air, Stabbed, and died in stinging. The hive woke. Poisonous fuming Of sulphur filled the hollow trunk, and crawling Blue flame sputtered — yet still their suicidal Live raiders dived and clung to our hands and hair. O it was Carthage under the Roman torches, Or loud with flames and falling timber, Troy! A job well botched. Half of the honey melted And half the rest young grubs. Through earth-black smouldering ashes And maimed bees groaning, we drew out our plunder. Little enough their gold, and slight our joy. Fallen then the city of instinctive wisdom. Tragedy is written distinct and small: A hive burned on a cool night in summer. But loss is a precious stone to me, a nectar Distilled in time, preaching the truth of winter To the fallen heart that does not cease to fall.