1630 Nature poems

The dragonfly at rest on the doorbell— too weak to ring and glad of it, but well mannered and cautious, thinking it best to observe us quietly before flying in, and who knows if he will find the way out? Cautious of traps, this one. A winged cross, plain, the body straight as a thermometer, the old glass kind that could kill us with mercury if our teeth did not respect its brittle body. Slim as an eel but a solitary glider, a pilot without bombs or weapons, and wings clear and small as a wish to see over our heads, to see the whole picture. And when our gaze grazes over it and moves on, the dragonfly changes its clothes, sheds its old skin, shriveled like laundry, and steps forth, polished black, with two circles buttoned like epaulettes taking the last space at the edge of its eyes.

Borne forward by extended increments. Crawling waterward from this weed wilted shore. Like small furred voles skittering inward, taking little grounded, mirrored steps: Like this, intervals of ice ridge and rime the pond rim. By night. As if by dreaming ice might cast its million limbs over that surface above. Its frozen tincture outfolding farther, farther unfurling across. By dawn: The moonspread scales then a foregone conclusion. Constructed, transmutable truth: All day ice shrinking from the light, reconsidering. And still, in leaving, leaving its lingering doubt, pale shadow of wingspan edgebound. Near. Then again in dark the cold falling, fallen to glow on the meniscus, ice groping forward with more sliding white. Ice: Its own logic, growing: Its horizontal precipice. Its glass carapace. Night's cold and hoary frost. Vaster still till all its heirs' outstretched tips interslip, imprint with their ferny whorls an entire span between lands. To travel that unthinkably far! And then, having reached to cry out more room!—crack like a shell, heave between its crushing shores. But which pressing which? And what boundary divides water from ice, what self solidifies against self, which is water—host or whore? Ice now in spring dissolving, dissolute reversal by increments retreating. Not I, alive, here mudnudged under eaves, forming my young egg by egg, mother's lasting bequest. To nest once in heat. To hatch and be born.

I. Le Bonheur dogwood flakes what is green the petals from the apple blow on the road mourning doves mark the sway of the afternoon, bees dig the plum blossoms the morning stands up straight, the night is blue from the full of the April moon iris and lilac, birds birds, yellow flowers white flowers, the Diesel does not let up dragging the plow as the whippoorwill, the night’s tractor, grinds his song and no other birds but us are as busy (O saisons, O chateaux! Délires! What soul is without fault? Nobody studies happiness Every time the cock crows I salute him I have no longer any excuse for envy. My life has been given its orders: the seasons seize the soul and the body, and make mock of any dispersed effort. The hour of death is the only trespass II. The Charge dogwood flakes the green the petals from the apple-trees fall for the feet to walk on the birds are so many they are loud, in the afternoon they distract, as so many bees do suddenly all over the place With spring one knows today to see that in the morning each thing is separate but by noon they have melted into each other and by night only crazy things like the full moon and the whippoorwill and us, are busy. We are busy if we can get by that whiskered bird, that nightjar, and get across, the moon is our conversation, she will say what soul isn’t in default? can you afford not to make the magical study which happiness is? do you hear the cock when he crows? do you know the charge, that you shall have no envy, that your life has its orders, that the seasons seize you too, that no body and soul are one if they are not wrought in this retort? that otherwise efforts are efforts? And that the hour of your flight will be the hour of your death? III. Spring The dogwood lights up the day. The April moon flakes the night. Birds, suddenly, are a multitude The flowers are ravined by bees, the fruit blossoms are thrown to the ground, the wind the rain forces everything. Noise— even the night is drummed by whippoorwills, and we get as busy, we plow, we move, we break out, we love. The secret which got lost neither hides nor reveals itself, it shows forth tokens. And we rush to catch up. The body whips the soul. In its great desire it demands the elixir In the roar of spring, transmutations. Envy drags herself off. The fault of the body and the soul —that they are not one— the matutinal cock clangs and singleness: we salute you season of no bungling

Robins in the cottonwoods, holding still as the thin snow comes. The sun seems to flood them with blood. They have settled in the empty branches while the storm-lamps spit in your limbs, red evening swinging across the sky then dropping, ragged, into your frame to stay with you as you move and smile and have opinions. Then a woman’s torso white with dawn— their rich perch is yours, there is nothing you need to expect or retrieve, like warm fields floating toward an invisible moon. A person learns stone-throated composures and barters for days of calm weather, like a man in a dream who understands the answering pressure of eyes—you ask too much. But the birds are not reckless. Every minute their fat shapes are filling with sun, and I apprentice myself to their candor. Their bodies drift on the moving branches, solid— they are not taking and keeping. They are not torn papers in a rumor of wind, their small backs brown fields holding thunderclouds up. Inside their bodies, nothing falls to the earth and dies.

When the tide lay under the clouds of an afternoon and gave them back to themselves oilier a little and filled with anonymous boats, I used to sit and drink at the very edge of it, where light passed through the liquids in the glasses and threw itself on the white drapes of the tables, resting there like clarity itself, you might think, right where you could put a hand to it. As drink gave way to drink, the slow unfathomable voices of luncheon made a window of ultraviolet light in the mind, through which one at last saw the skeleton of everything, stripped of any sense or consequence, freed of geography and absolutely devoid of charm; and in this originating brightness you might see somebody putting a napkin against his lips or placing a blazing credit card on a plastic tray and you'd know. You would know goddamn it. And never be able to say.

Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. — Andrew Marvell These are all thoughts — of course. At the edge of the ocean with nowhere to go, the nearest land three thousand miles away and under different management, the diving sun another thirty thousand times that, there is no reality, only these parlous notions, messages, statements, stylings on the edge of extinction. Little petillas. A kind of spontaneous zoo of   human recency and arrival and promontory variorum. Imprudent comb-over thoughts, rigid and proud eye-catching false thoughts, little jiggling thoughts, intricate braided-beard thoughts the product of much misplaced patience, product placement thoughts (which are rather elementary, and are almost a contradiction in terms), unlike myriad highly-evolved dog thoughts (no mutts here), pushing a baby in a three-wheeled stroller whilst running very hard in no shirt and six-pack thoughts, this a development on the now-obsolete egg and paddle (what it does to the infant to be impelled at such a rate into the future whilst facing backwards like an Aeroflot passenger is not recorded — not that forward is necessarily better), high-concept silky-swishing Afghan hound thoughts, intrusive bum thoughts, hapless and homeless panhandler thoughts (a smarte carte loaded with undesirables never far to seek), low-slung belly-dragging beagle thoughts little better than the serpent in the Bible, holding hands Adam and Eve thoughts, foot-shuffling Zimmer frame thoughts, “revolution in mobility” wheelchair and gravel thoughts, pushed by most likely an illegal attendant borderline thoughts, candy-striped T-shirt and shorts thoughts, cut-off thoughts, paired with sometimes nothing more than a bikini top, those three-quarter length thin and probably amphibious trousers, worn without socks, that men go in for, suggestive of adaptability and resourcefulness thoughts, standard over-loud mobile thoughts, (“our relationship is...    ”), lying immobile on the grass on your back mobile thoughts (these are different), tourist thoughts, an unexpected preponderance of  Russian thoughts (though with residential qualifications), borscht belt leopard skin thoughts dripping with gold and eccentric lamentations, dog and baby both thoughts (these last thought to be ideally-balanced), high-stepping poodle thoughts like a four-wheel drive with little intelligence in rough country, furiously texting in the glare with all thumbs to the pump thoughts, being at least half elsewhere, baseball cap thoughts rife with determination, slightly dated straw hat thoughts, reverse baseball cap also thoughts.

As in green,vert, a royal demesne stocked with deer.Invert as in tipped as a snow globe, going nowhere in circles but not lost, not bereft as the wood without deer, waiting for the white antlered buck, or his does, or any slim yearling to step along the berm, return.Vertigo as in whirling round,swimming in the head, unanchored by the long spring, the horse cantering, the meadow dropping like an elevator into the earth, falling like Persephone through a crevice, a swiveling crack, a loose screw, a lost way.Disordered as in death lasts, my brother’s not coming back. The spin of it continuous as in looking down from height, and then it stops, the spinning just slows, a chariot wheel stilled in grass. The world is the same, but it isn’t. The tipped views of trees when hanging from your knees. The deer in twos and threes watching.

After D.H.L. Your first thought when the light snaps on and the black wings clatter about the kitchen       is a bat the clear part of  your mind considers rabies       the other part does not consider       knows only to startle and cower away from the slap of  its wings       though it is soon clearly not a bat but a moth       and harmless still you are shy of it       it clings to the hood of the stove not black but brown       its orange eyes sparkle like televisions       its leg  joints are large enough to count how could you kill it       where would you hide the body a creature so solid must have room for a soul and if  this is so       why not in a creature half  its size       or half its size again       and so on down to the ants       clearly it must be saved caught in a shopping bag and rushed to the front door afraid to crush it       feeling the plastic rattle loosened into the night air       it batters the porch light throwing fitful shadows around the landing That was a really big moth is all you can say to the doorman who has watched your whole performance with a smile the half-compassion and half-horror we feel for the creatures we want not to hurt       and prefer not to touch

Branching the way blind fingers splay across The face they’re reading, trees trace the backyard Ditch sop that their shadows drop off into Space, an abyss where I hear a neighbor boy’s Voice cursing an exhilarated, out of its mind, Unappeasably inventive flow of “Fuck fuck motherfuck” ecstasy that maybe He imagines the neighborhood can't hear?— or is his tongue wired To some source of inspired but as yet unknown Intelligence that radiates from all of us and he Is its mouthpiece, speaking it to the trees That screen him from me listening to his Unrelenting arias, predestined like birdsong Flowing unbidden, of four-letter almost Erotic keening over something I know too, Everybody knows?— and even if all it is Is the “fuck fuck motherfuck” ecstasy Of April budding in his mouth and sending down Roots to some anti-self that sprouts and shadows Him as it croons and shouts the song of its difference— Even then, this Billy whom I don’t think twice about When we meet in the alley and slap palms Or I see him playing alone on the swings of big kids’ slide, Even then is he the vessel of some signal that uses us, Down in the abyss irradiating him so that just this instant Whatever that other uses him for he can’t resist: His voice an instrument of blissed-out torment Until that grip flings him loose— Who knows which of us it chooses to penetrate Next, making us suddenly sweat or shiver, That influence bathing everything budding in profane rays.

Shouldn’t it ache, this slit into the sweet and salt mix of  waters comprising the mussel, its labial meats winged open: yellow- fleshed, black and gray around the tough adductor? It hurts to imagine it, regardless of the harvester’s denials, swiveling his knife to make the incision: one dull cyst nicked from the oyster’s mantle — its thread of red gland no bigger than a seed of  trout roe — pressed inside the tendered flesh. Both hosts eased open with a knife (as if anything could be said to be eased with a knife): so that one pearl after another can be harvested, polished, added to others until a single rope is strung on silk. Linked by what you think is pain. Nothing could be so roughly handled and yet feel so little, your pity turned into part of this production: you with your small, four-chambered heart, shyness, hungers, envy: what could be so precious you’d cleave another to keep it close? Imagine the weeks it takes to wind nacre over the red seed placed at the other heart’s mantle. The mussel become what no one wants to: vessel, caisson, wounded into making us the thing we want to call beautiful.