1630 Nature poems

In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs, in the green that would balance on the wide green world, air filled with flux, world-in-a-belly in the blue lilac weather, she had written a letter: You came into my life really fast and I liked it. When we let go the basket of the good-luck birds the sky erupted open in the hail of its libation; there was a gap and we entered it gladly. Indeed the birds may have broken the sky and we, soaked, squelched in the mud of our joy, braided with wet-thighed surrender. In the yellow time of pollen near the blue time of lilacs there was a gap in things. And here we are. The sparrows flew away so fast a camera could not catch them. The monkey swung between our arms and said I am, hooray, the monkey of all events, the great gibbon of convergences. We were falling towards each other already and the utter abandon to orbits was delicious. The falcon rested on the little man’s arm and falconry was the High Path of the World. Whole minutes passed. We were falling and the jungle fell with us. She said I came, I came to my senses really fast and you liked it. I was surrounded by the fluttering of wings, nothing but a whirring in my ears, and the whole earth tilted and I lost my reason. For a time falconry was the high path of the world. At night the sky was filled with animals. Ganesh loomed large among those points of light. He said Change! and we said Lord we are ready to bend. Thou art the high exalted most flexible. He said Then I will enter into your very dreams. And the yellow-tailed black cockatoo, ablaze in his own musculature, soared all night above the sunlit fields of whisky grass that stretched inside me to a river’s edge. The great bird cawed its majesty, a sonic boom; and even I was barely welcome there. There was a gap in things; and all the lilacs bloomed. Words split in our grasp. We were licking the cream from the universal ice. Words foundered and cracked. How the bonnet was warm on your bottom! And the metal continued tick-ticking though the engine was off. And the evening shuddered, since everything is connected. I was licking the cream from the universal saucer. I was all of Cheshire and points between. You saw the great sky turn blacker, you saw the spray of stars and your hair got tangled in the windscreen wiper. At the hot ponds we stripped as night closed in. I secretly admired your underwear, your long elusive legs. In the spring where we lay side by side we held hands. Up above the steam the sky. I said That one is called Sirius or Dog Star, but only here on Earth. And when since the stories foretold it we parted, those birds were all released again. Such buoyancy. They go on forever like that. How else to say thank you in a foreign place? We are ever in the arms of our exile, forever going one way and the other though sometimes of course on a sphere that is not so bad. I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act. We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin. In the yellow time of pollen when the fields were ablaze we were very near bewildered by beauty. The sky was a god-bee that hummed. All the air boomed with that thunder. It was both for the prick and the nectar we drank that we gave ourselves over.

SPRING, COAST RANGE The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless, The circle of white ash widens around it. I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller. Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw; The moon has come before them, the light Like a choir of children in the young laurel trees. It is April; the shad, the hot headed fish, Climbs the rivers; there is trillium in the damp canyons; The foetid adder’s tongue lolls by the waterfall. There was a farm at this campsite once, it is almost gone now. There were sheep here after the farm, and fire Long ago burned the redwoods out of the gulch, The Douglas fir off the ridge; today the soil Is stony and incoherent, the small stones lie flat And plate the surface like scales. Twenty years ago the spreading gully Toppled the big oak over onto the house. Now there is nothing left but the foundations Hidden in poison oak, and above on the ridge, Six lonely, ominous fenceposts; The redwood beams of the barn make a footbridge Over the deep waterless creek bed; The hills are covered with wild oats Dry and white by midsummer. I walk in the random survivals of the orchard. In a patch of moonlight a mole Shakes his tunnel like an angry vein; Orion walks waist deep in the fog coming in from the ocean; Leo crouches under the zenith. There are tiny hard fruits already on the plum trees. The purity of the apple blossoms is incredible. As the wind dies down their fragrance Clusters around them like thick smoke. All the day they roared with bees, in the moonlight They are silent and immaculate. SPRING, SIERRA NEVADA Once more golden Scorpio glows over the col Above Deadman Canyon, orderly and brilliant, Like an inspiration in the brain of Archimedes. I have seen its light over the warm sea, Over the coconut beaches, phosphorescent and pulsing; And the living light in the water Shivering away from the swimming hand, Creeping against the lips, filling the floating hair. Here where the glaciers have been and the snow stays late, The stone is clean as light, the light steady as stone. The relationship of stone, ice and stars is systematic and enduring: Novelty emerges after centuries, a rock spalls from the cliffs, The glacier contracts and turns grayer, The stream cuts new sinuosities in the meadow, The sun moves through space and the earth with it, The stars change places. The snow has lasted longer this year, Than anyone can remember. The lowest meadow is a lake, The next two are snowfields, the pass is covered with snow, Only the steepest rocks are bare. Between the pass And the last meadow the snowfield gapes for a hundred feet, In a narrow blue chasm through which a waterfall drops, Spangled with sunset at the top, black and muscular Where it disappears again in the snow. The world is filled with hidden running water That pounds in the ears like ether; The granite needles rise from the snow, pale as steel; Above the copper mine the cliff is blood red, The white snow breaks at the edge of it; The sky comes close to my eyes like the blue eyes Of someone kissed in sleep. I descend to camp, To the young, sticky, wrinkled aspen leaves, To the first violets and wild cyclamen, And cook supper in the blue twilight. All night deer pass over the snow on sharp hooves, In the darkness their cold muzzles find the new grass At the edge of the snow. FALL, SIERRA NEVADA This morning the hermit thrush was absent at breakfast, His place was taken by a family of chickadees; At noon a flock of humming birds passed south, Whirling in the wind up over the saddle between Ritter and Banner, following the migration lane Of the Sierra crest southward to Guatemala. All day cloud shadows have moved over the face of the mountain, The shadow of a golden eagle weaving between them Over the face of the glacier. At sunset the half-moon rides on the bent back of the Scorpion, The Great Bear kneels on the mountain. Ten degrees below the moon Venus sets in the haze arising from the Great Valley. Jupiter, in opposition to the sun, rises in the alpenglow Between the burnt peaks. The ventriloquial belling Of an owl mingles with the bells of the waterfall. Now there is distant thunder on the east wind. The east face of the mountain above me Is lit with far off lightnings and the sky Above the pass blazes momentarily like an aurora. It is storming in the White Mountains, On the arid fourteen-thousand-foot peaks; Rain is falling on the narrow gray ranges And dark sedge meadows and white salt flats of Nevada. Just before moonset a small dense cumulus cloud, Gleaming like a grape cluster of metal, Moves over the Sierra crest and grows down the westward slope. Frost, the color and quality of the cloud, Lies over all the marsh below my campsite. The wiry clumps of dwarfed whitebark pines Are smoky and indistinct in the moonlight, Only their shadows are really visible. The lake is immobile and holds the stars And the peaks deep in itself without a quiver. In the shallows the geometrical tendrils of ice Spread their wonderful mathematics in silence. All night the eyes of deer shine for an instant As they cross the radius of my firelight. In the morning the trail will look like a sheep driveway, All the tracks will point down to the lower canyon. “Thus,” says Tyndall, “the concerns of this little place Are changed and fashioned by the obliquity of the earth’s axis, The chain of dependence which runs through creation, And links the roll of a planet alike with the interests Of marmots and of men.”

I’m overcome by the cruelty of nature no I mean I’m with it. And each little capacity it has can’t be transferred I mean a spruce can’t give its oils to you can it. But that’s how it grows in the ab sence of technology my thoughts grow. My thoughts grow among trees but I don’t help them though I’m for them. I’m for my dog & inci dentally I feed her but I don’t see her much. Joe does. Joe is my friend & also a dog father I don’t help mountains Mountains help me I know the planet is old & splashy sleep helps me. Time helps me. My mother helped me. And now she is gone. She also hurt me so it’s good that she’s gone. I can grow different in the day or three decades in which I’ve got left I can grow toward the mountains sit in solidarity with prisoners or go to jail. I’m not joking I can push different. I want to say something about my cunt. Because that’s what you ask. But I am alone. No mother no phone just a notebook & a cunt & my thoughts. I don’t even think my thoughts. You do.

Traveling through the dark I found a deer dead on the edge of the Wilson River road. It is usually best to roll them into the canyon: that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead. By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing; she had stiffened already, almost cold. I dragged her off; she was large in the belly. My fingers touching her side brought me the reason— her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting, alive, still, never to be born. Beside that mountain road I hesitated. The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights; under the hood purred the steady engine. I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red; around our group I could hear the wilderness listen. I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—, then pushed her over the edge into the river.

It is not the chambers of the heart that hold him captive, but the hallways of the mind. Why his image burning green and blue persists —the face, the eyes questioning, the shape of his head—is beyond anything I can understand.

I do my best to keep pointlessness at bay. But here, wet above my knees, I let it fly. Here, hot and cold, fingers thick with thinking, I try to tie the fly and look for the net, loosening the philosophical knot of why I came here today, not yet knowing whether I’ll free or fry the rainbows and browns once they’re mine.

Trust that there is a tiger, muscular Tasmanian, and sly, which has never been seen and never will be seen by any human eye. Trust that thirty thousand sword- fish will never near a ship, that far from cameras or cars elephant herds live long elephant lives. Believe that bees by the billions find unidentified flowers on unmapped marshes and mountains. Safe in caves of contentment, bears sleep. Through vast canyons, horses run while slowly snakes stretch beyond their skins in the sun. I must trust all this to be true, though the few birds at my feeder watch the window with small flutters of fear, so like my own.

I went to turn the grass once after one Who mowed it in the dew before the sun. The dew was gone that made his blade so keen Before I came to view the levelled scene. I looked for him behind an isle of trees; I listened for his whetstone on the breeze. But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, And I must be, as he had been,—alone, ‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart, ‘Whether they work together or apart.’ But as I said it, swift there passed me by On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly, Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight. And once I marked his flight go round and round, As where some flower lay withering on the ground. And then he flew as far as eye could see, And then on tremulous wing came back to me. I thought of questions that have no reply, And would have turned to toss the grass to dry; But he turned first, and led my eye to look At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook, A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared. I left my place to know them by their name, Finding them butterfly weed when I came. The mower in the dew had loved them thus, By leaving them to flourish, not for us, Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him. But from sheer morning gladness at the brim. The butterfly and I had lit upon, Nevertheless, a message from the dawn, That made me hear the wakening birds around, And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground, And feel a spirit kindred to my own; So that henceforth I worked no more alone; But glad with him, I worked as with his aid, And weary, sought at noon with him the shade; And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach. ‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart, ‘Whether they work together or apart.’

This to be beautiful to you Set against all this you know of So ominous, set against it, Overcome, might overcome. This to be beautiful, beautiful, Never alone enough with God Never enough among fountains This be beautiful Spring blue. Leaf love you for this the while I am with you and the while after This earth I am standing on, the Herons and smaller birds possess. This to be beautiful to you The downward fire I spoke of The eel grass, the snowy path, The wide shore, the wide shore. Speak of it, speak it, unceasing, all These lines to the tomb, O turning tree, Set against all this you know of Overcome, will, overcome. Grave tree of the dark plowland under, I will will the whole time to you: Falling water, wave falling, dew Dust, horses, spirits, Spirit.

❖ A hundred red fire ants scouring, scouring the white peony ❖ Fallen plum blossoms return to the branch, you sleep, then harden again ❖ Cuttlefish in my palm stiffens with rigor mortis, boy toys can't love ❖ Neighbor's barn: grass mat, crickets, Blue Boy, trowel handle, dress soaked in mud ❖ Iron-headed mace; double-studded halberd slice into emptiness ❖ O fierce Oghuz, tie me to two wild elephants, tear me in half ❖ O my swarthy herder, two-humped bactrian, drive me the long distance ❖ Forceps, tongs,bushi, whip, flanks, scabbard, stirrup, goads, distaff, wither, awl ❖ Black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne's lace, bounty of cyclamen, mown paths erupt ❖ Gaze at the charred hills, the woebegone kiosks, we are all God's hussies ❖ I have not fondled the emperor's lapdog, whose name is Black Muzzle ❖ Urge your horses into the mist-swilled Galilee, O sweet Bedlamite ❖ Her Majesty's randying up the jewel stairs to find the pleasure dome ❖ Ancient pond; the frog jumps in and in and in: the deep slap of water ❖ The frog jumps into the ancient pond; she says, no, I am not ready ❖ Coyote cooked his dead wife's vagina and fed it to his new wife ❖ I plucked out three white pubic hairs and they turned into flying monkeys ❖ Let's do it on the antimacassar, on the antimacassar ❖ Little Red drew her teeny pistol from her basket and said "eat me" ❖ Chimera: Madame Pol Pot grafting a date tree onto a date tree ❖ His unworthy appendage, his mutinous henchman grazed my pink cheeks ❖ He on top now changes to bottom, Goddess welcomes her devotee ❖ Fish fish fowl fowl, mock me Mistress Bean Curd, I am both duck and essence ❖ Don't touch him, bitch, we're engaged; and besides, he's wearing my nipple ring ❖ Sing sing little yellow blight rage rage against the dying of the light