1630 Nature poems

Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay, As the flowers recited their lines And pike stirred at the bottom of the pond. The pen was cool to the touch. The staircase swept upward Through fragmented garlands, keeping the melancholy Already distilled in letters of the alphabet. It would be time for winter now, its spun-sugar Palaces and also lines of care At the mouth, pink smudges on the forehead and cheeks, The color once known as “ashes of roses.” How many snakes and lizards shed their skins For time to be passing on like this, Sinking deeper in the sand as it wound toward The conclusion. It had all been working so well and now, Well, it just kind of came apart in the hand As a change is voiced, sharp As a fishhook in the throat, and decorative tears flowed Past us into a basin called infinity. There was no charge for anything, the gates Had been left open intentionally. Don’t follow, you can have whatever it is. And in some room someone examines his youth, Finds it dry and hollow, porous to the touch. O keep me with you, unless the outdoors Embraces both of us, unites us, unless The birdcatchers put away their twigs, The fishermen haul in their sleek empty nets And others become part of the immense crowd Around this bonfire, a situation That has come to mean us to us, and the crying In the leaves is saved, the last silver drops.

Lepisosteus osseus Despite it all, something stirs at the sight Of the cool, enameled body, The unreflecting eye, And the long jaw like a chisel With its single, violent purpose. It hangs dead still at the water's surface And seems lifeless, until A flickering gesture Carves fish after fish From any school that swims too close And creates in the world a new absence, As if this might be the shaper As well as the defacer Of the damaged masterpiece Whose headless body hails the bodies Of the many Egyptians excised at Cyprus.

Vinegrowers dig up dig under the darkhoured watch, depth for depth, you read, the invisible one commands the wind to stay in bounds, you read, the Open Ones carry the stone behind the eye, it recognizes you, on a Sabbath.

there are fat wet vines creeping into my house through the pipes and through the walls gentle as blue flames they curl into my living there is ice in my attic sugar on my tile I am present and useless like a nose torn from a face and set in a bowl when I saw God I used the wrong pronouns God bricked up my mouthhole his fists were white as gold there were roaches in my beard now I live like a widow every day a heave of knitting patterns and sex toys my family speaks of me with such pride noonesh to roghane they say his bread is in oil I thank them for that and for their chromosomes most of which have been lovely I am lovely too my body is hard and choked with juice like a plastic throat stuffed with real grapes my turn-ons include Ovid and fake leather my turn- offs have all been ushered into the base- ment I’ll drink to them and to any victory the vines are all growing toward the foot of my bed I am waiting for them to come under the covers I am the only person still in this house there is no one here to look away

I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface breaks into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts. If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck, I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises. Diggers, forgetters. . . . A series of successive single instances . . . Frames of reference moving . . . The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands: bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged and rippling mosses. What heat is this in me that would thaw time, making bits of instance overlap shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through this culture slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings, opportunities taken? . . . If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I break it apart without crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled airy loambits, and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot in . . . Erasure. Tell me something and then take it back. Bring this pellucid moment—here on this page now as on this patch of soil, my property—bring it up to the top and out of sequence. Make it dumb again—won’t you?—what would it take? Leach the humidities out, the things that will insist on making meaning. Parch it. It isn’t hard: just take this shovelful and spread it out, deranged, a vertigo of single clots in full sun and you can, easy, decivilize it, un- hinge it from its plot. Upthrown like this, I think you can eventually abstract it. Do you wish to? Disentangled, it grows very very clear. Even the mud, the sticky lemon-colored clay hardens and then yields, crumbs. I can’t say what it is then, but the golden-headed hallucination, mating, forgetting, speckling, inter- locking, will begin to be gone from it and then its glamorous veil of echoes and muddy nostalgias will be gone. If I touch the slender new rootings they show me how large I am, look at these fingers—what a pilot—I touch, I press their slowest electricity. . . . What speed is it at? What speed am I at here, on my knees, as the sun traverses now and just begins to touch my back. What speed where my fingers, under the dark oaks, are suddenly touched, lit up—so white as they move, the ray for a moment on them alone in the small wood. White hands in the black-green glade, opening the muddy cartoon of the present, taking the tiny roots of the moss apart, hired hands, curiosity’s small army, so white in these greens— make your revolution in the invisible temple, make your temple in the invisible revolution—I can’t see the errands you run, hands gleaming for this instant longer like tinfoil at the bottom here of the tall whispering oaks . . . Listen, Boccioni the futurist says a galloping horse has not four legs (it has twenty)—and “at C there is no sequence because there is no time”—and since at lightspeed, etc. (everything is simultaneous): my hands serrated with desires, shoved into these excavated fates —mauve, maroons, gutters of flecking golds— my hands are living in myriad manifestations of light. . . . “All forms of imitation are to be despised.” “All subjects previously used must be discarded.” “At last we shall rush rapidly past objectiveness” . . . Oh enslavement, will you take these hands and hold them in for a time longer? Tops of the oaks, do you see my tiny golden hands pushed, up to the wrists, into the present? Star I can’t see in daylight, young, light and airy star— I put the seed in. The beam moves on.

A monstrosity in the alley. A many-bodied movement grouped for terror, their flights’ brief shadows on the kitchen curtains, on the street’s reliquaries of loose squares and hustle. Some minds are groomed for defiance. The youngest calls out his territory with muscular vowels where street light spills peculiar, his hand a chorus of heat and recoil. “Could have been a doctor” say those who knew and did not know him, though he never wanted to know what gargles endlessly in a body — wet hives, planets unspooled from their throbbing shapes. There are many ways to look at this. He got what he wished against. He got wings on his shoes for a sacrifice. The postulate that stars turn a blind eye to the cobalt corners of rooms is incorrect. Light only helps or ruins sight. Daylight does cruel things to a boy’s face.

Walking past the open window, she is surprised by the song of the white-throated sparrow and stops to listen. She has been thinking of the dead ones she loves--her father who lived over a century, and her oldest son, suddenly gone at forty-seven--and she can't help thinking she has called them back, that they are calling her in the voices of these birds passing through Ohio on their spring migration. . . because, after years of summers in upstate New York, the white-throat has become something like the family bird. Her father used to stop whatever he was doing and point out its clear, whistling song. She hears it again: "Poor Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody." She tries not to think, "Poor Andy," but she has already thought it, and now she is weeping. But then she hears another, so clear, it's as if the bird were in the room with her, or in her head, telling her that everything will be all right. She cannot see them from her second-story window-- they are hidden in the new leaves of the old maple, or behind the white blossoms of the dogwood-- but she stands and listens, knowing they will stay for only a few days before moving on.

Comet of stillness princess of what is over high note held without trembling without voice without sound aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences never caught in words warden of where the river went touch of its surface sibyl of the extinguished window onto the hidden place and the other time at the foot of the wall by the road patient without waiting in the full moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me you are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you even now you are unharmed even now perfect as you have always been now when your light paws are running on the breathless night on the bridge with one end I remember you when I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars from the creeds of difference and the contradictions that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications as long as it lasted until something that we were had ended when you are no longer anything let me catch sight of you again going over the wall and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures guttering on a screen let my words find their own places in the silence after the animals

The town’s trees, roomy with winter, have begun of late to fill with them, a settling that commences with dusk. The widows complain — claim they can smell them, can hear them shuffling in the trees, a wing hitting a branch a sound sharp, they say, as ice cracking. They cannot sleep. And so you form a committee, convening with shotguns to fire every night into the darkling congregation. Every night, the air resounds with that resolve, and every dusk they return with theirs, circle, a lazy familiar vortex around a drain, an old appointment they keep with an inescapable place; this argument no way, Claude says, to be any less afraid.

It will be windy for a while until it isn’t. The waves will shoal. A red-legged cormorant will trace her double along glassy water, forgetting they are hungry. The sea will play this motif over and over, but there will be no preparing for it otherwise. Water will quiver in driftwood. Sound preceding absence, a white dog trailing a smaller one: ghost and noon shadow, two motes disappearing into surf. And when the low tide comes lapping and clear, the curled fronds of seaweed will furl and splay, their algal sisters brushing strands against sands where littleneck clams feed underwater. Light rain will fall and one cannot help but lean into the uncertainty of the sea. Bow: a knot of two loops, two loose ends, our bodies on either side of this shore where we will dip our hands to feel what can’t be seen. Horseshoe crabs whose blue blood rich in copper will reach for cover, hinged between clouds and sea. It will never be enough, the bull kelp like a whip coiling in tender hands, hands who know to take or be taken, but take nothing with them: I will marry you. I will marry you. So we can owe what we own to every beautiful thing.