1630 Nature poems

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.

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.