1630 Nature poems

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.

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.