1630 Nature poems

It was dusk, the light hesitating and a murmer in the wind, when the deer, exhausted, turned to look at me, an arrow in its side. Though I pity dreamers, taking a thread and weaving it upon the loom of Self—the secret, gaudy, wonderful new cloth—, I will tell the end of the story. His shoulder was torn, the joint held by one sinew, which I severed with the blade of the arrow, so when he ran there were no impediments. The black dogs that followed were swifter, their barking ancient, despicable. As he fell, his chest turned to breastplate, his one powerful arm covered with pagan signs. Nearly stupid in my waiting for what would happen next, each breath propelling me and him toward dust, I woke, the sheets soaked, heart fluttering—: When death comes into the sleeping room as through a tiny hole, like a rent in the Covenant, it hurts.

A few companions had been doing too much talking beside the purple water. The troupe, panic-stricken, ran away, and I found I was incapable of following them. I stepped into the water and the depths turned luminous; faraway ferns could just be seen. The reflections of other dark plants stopped them rising to the surface. Red threads took on all sorts of shapes, caught in the invisible and doubtless powerful currents. A plaster-cast woman advancing caused me to make a gesture which was to take me far. Translated from the French

Long ago we quit lifting our heels like the others—horse, dog, and tiger— though we thrill to their speed as they flee. Even the mouse bearing the great weight of a nugget of dog food is enviably graceful. There is little spring to our walk, we are so burdened with responsibility, all of the disciplinary actions that have fallen to us, the punishments, the killings, and all with our feet bound stiff in the skins of the conquered. But sometimes, in the early hours, we can feel what it must have been like to be one of them, up on our toes, stealing past doors where others are sleeping, and suddenly able to see in the dark.

In movies when the hero is about to die, He scatters a few phrases in a place like this, Hoping the words will come up again Immortal, or the grasses will reach out for him As now they do for us. Someone has planted a row of little trees To stop the wind. Instead they’ve learned To bend like the elect In one direction only; they know The sea will shatter them. Isn’t it always like this? Something uncontrollable becomes the hero, Taking off its dress, the ice plants Sunburn from the center out So we can see that their deaths Of splendid rust and yellow are not ours, We are allowed again the glare Of the sand, the druid hills, The grasses brushing the legs, though Just to have felt it once would have been enough.

Anyone with quiet pace who walks a gray road in the West may hear a badger underground where in deep flint another time is Caught by flint and held forever, the quiet pace of God stopped still. Anyone who listens walks on time that dogs him single file, To mountains that are far from people, the face of the land gone gray like flint. Badgers dig their little lives there, quiet-paced the land lies gaunt, The railroad dies by a yellow depot, town falls away toward a muddy creek. Badger-gray the sod goes under a river of wind, a hawk on a stick.

She and I make a bladder bag to draw water from the ice trench. She/I chain stitch/es a skin dressed in oil to make a new pot of soup. She/I sew/s a badger hair rough around the top of her/my kamiks to make the steps windward, toward the limits of woman. She/I eat/s club root and white clover to strengthen her/my silver body to bear a child. She/I map/s, following 1 degree from the North Star and 60 degrees from the end of the earth’s axis on rotation for Ukpeagvik she/I use/s a small arc of ice, cleaving into parts, reduced to simple curves fitted with serrated edges of white flesh. She/I mold/s to the fretted neck of frozen water into a deep urn, made like a rock shelter or a cavern. She/I construct/s a hole on the surface of a glacier formed by melting particles of roe and pan reservoir dust from a shelter for the ice worms. Because the earth is molding, burning, laughing, and purging its crust.

Wash of cold river in a glacial land, Ionian water, chill, snow-ribbed sand, drift of rare flowers, clear, with delicate shell- like leaf enclosing frozen lily-leaf, camellia texture, colder than a rose; wind-flower that keeps the breath of the north-wind— these and none other; intimate thoughts and kind reach out to share the treasure of my mind, intimate hands and dear drawn garden-ward and sea-ward all the sheer rapture that I would take to mould a clear and frigid statue; rare, of pure texture, beautiful space and line, marble to grace your inaccessible shrine.

It was the fruit I wanted, not the nest. The nest was hanging like the richest fruit against the sun. I took the nest and with it came the heart, and in my hand the kingdom and the queen, frail surfaces, rested for a moment. Then the drones awoke and did their painful business. I let the city drop upon the stones. It split to its deep palaces and combs. It bled the insect gold, the pupa queens like tiny eyes wriggled from their sockets, and somewhere the monarch cowered in a veil of wings in passages through which at evening the labourers had homed, burdened with silence and the garden scents. The secret heart was broken suddenly. I, to whom the knowledge had been given, who was not after knowledge but a fruit, remember how a knot of pains swelled my hand to a round nest; blood throbbed in the hurt veins as if an unseen swarm mined there. The nest oozed bitter honey. I swaddled my fat hand in cotton. After a week pain gave it back to me scarred and weakened like a shrivelled skin. A second fruit is growing on the tree. Identical—the droning in the leaves. It ripens. I have another hand.

That afternoon the dream of the toads rang through the elms by Little River and affected the thoughts of men, though they were not conscious that they heard it. --Henry Thoreau The dream of toads: we rarely credit what we consider lesser life with emotions big as ours, but we are easily distracted, abstracted. People sit nibbling before television's flicker watching ghosts chase balls and each other while the skunk is out risking grisly death to cross the highway to mate; while the fox scales the wire fence where it knows the shotgun lurks to taste the sweet blood of a hen. Birds are greedy little bombs bursting to give voice to appetite. I had a cat who died of love. Dogs trail their masters across con- tinents. We are far too busy to be starkly simple in passion. We will never dream the intense wet spring lust of the toads.

To have gold in your back yard and not know it. . . I woke this morning before your dream had shredded And found a curious thing: flowers made of gold, Six-sided—more than that—broken on flagstones, Petals the color of a wedding band. You are sleeping. The morning comes up gold. Perhaps I made those flowers in my head, For I have counted snowflakes in July Blowing across my eyes like bits of calcium, And I have stepped into your dream at night, A stranger there, my body steeped in moonlight. I watched you tremble, washed in all that silver. Love, the stars have fallen into the garden And turned to frost. They have opened like a hand. It is the color that breaks out of the bedsheets. This morning the garden is littered with dry petals As yellow as the page of an old book. I step among them. They are brittle as bone china.