1630 Nature poems

Now the pink is in the water its wavy edges celebrated by cars & guys with hands in pockets staring out. A woman chewing gum by the window of the train. Which heaves its accordion on & we move. They call it choo-choo because of the faint chooing sound as it starts. It's twee too & dit dit dit eel & screech. All this as the colors change. The buildings they bothered to paint white are pink like someone's awful socks were mistakenly washed. Who owns this insidious red. The trees are black cause that's where the green goes. The girl who chews has fanned her fingers out below the glass and I long to stare at them. To count them one by one as the wires slip by. It's the sultriness, the smokey approach of the loss of light that I love. The homosexual lilac comes & it's ours & everyone like us. The bright compartment of white lights & gleaming flip top & yawns rage on. Outside the Hudson River queerness tools on my brain like a hopeless little wallet of feeling. A clear swipe to night. Everyone in my compartment is tearing now. It's true, I heard two sheets at once get torn to pluck a brownie out. Its smell oozes, & the other one, god knows whose—to park her gum? Her hands are holding her head, my silent partner's & she's sleeping (deep in my gaze.) I look at her knees, the wrinkled foot just above the heel, a yellowish unmoody pink. The trees crowd the house & finally we go fast finally it's not so warm on the train & boats are sitting on purple sand the mountains are bland & blue a woman's sigh is falling off, from on high and into her body. My partner's knees sway. Someone says Proust. Or was it Bruce. The train is rough. Cutting through sweetness every night. I think "time." Then "cargo."

BEEF: We are here between trees, with the tempo of a rosary being strung in a queue of escalating beads— BEEF: It's not quite the count in the countinghouse of my chest but the heart does make an awful attempt BEEF: a tee and a circle wherever it may be there was music coming on BEEF: which though machinery-like moves not in cogs, and never springs, but waves through BEEF: like wired applause for antic backstage buds on the pre-comeuppance buzz; but it fades BEEF: but only after the chorus has pulsed BEEF: it drops off with sudden decision, like fountain water gone dross BEEF: or it reaches the furthest point the branch turns from us, and is for some arc fully quiet... BEEF: until the roulette snaps its jaw and the choir's circuit opens to one BEEF: like a pigeon unhinged, its wings in sudden white-rumped ascent BEEF: unopposed by iridescence BEEF: unopposed by iridescence

I.“If the Night Could Get Up & Walk” I cannot put my hand into a cabbage to turn on the light, but the moon moves over the field of dark cabbage and an exchange fills all veins. The cabbage is also a globe of light, the two globes now two eyes in my saturated head! II.“One Must Try Behind the Hills” Eight Great Dahlias stood beyond the Mountains. They set fire to the Sun in a black wood beyond the Mountains, in the Valley of Vision In the Valley of Vision the Fission of Flowers yields all Power in the Valley of Vision. Eight Suns on Eight Stems, aflame!

Behold the rocky wall That down its sloping sides Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall, In rushing river-tides! Yon stream, whose sources run Turned by a pebble’s edge, Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun Through the cleft mountain-ledge. The slender rill had strayed, But for the slanting stone, To evening’s ocean, with the tangled braid Of foam-flecked Oregon. So from the heights of Will Life’s parting stream descends, And, as a moment turns its slender rill, Each widening torrent bends,— From the same cradle’s side, From the same mother’s knee,— One to long darkness and the frozen tide, One to the Peaceful Sea!

This is the deepest part of the world. Bird don’t fly here, but there is the sound of wings. The smell, just a struggle in the earth underneath the musty floorboards. Monsters hatch fully-grown from their eggs. Snaky legs indicate chaos. I carry sad omens, slobber down the psychic’s legs to her feet pointed backwards. I roll off the back of a skull strapped on top of a fox who shape-shifts into the irresistible. A Christian, Oklahoma-shaped and melancholic, caught at the entrance of a ditch as the best breath of me tornadoes into the next county.

feathery moths flutter on the screen unbearable sounds of summer oblivious tonight that my reading light is not my day stout bodies cut and bounce near a crack in the screen and beat inside a paper shade sacraments of a monumental natural presence we are drawn forever by the moths to other lights neighbors down the road

At times they will fly under. The dome contains jungles. Invent a sky under the dome. Creatures awake, asleep, at play, aglow: they float – unbottled genii – under the dome. Southern Belle, a splash of black, dusted with gold, dissembles,assembling, acts shy under the dome. Cattleheart, Giant Swallowtail, Clipper: sail, navigate sky high under the dome. Like confetti – a wedding – bits of Rice Paper: sheer mimicry under the dome. Magnificent Owl, in air, a pansy, it feeds, wings up, eye to eye, under the dome. Name them: Monarch, then Queen, last Viceroy. What will scientists deify under the dome? Basking against a leaf: a Banded Orange, displayed like a bowtie under the dome. A living museum. Exist to be observed: never migrate, but live, then die, under the dome. Lips, lashes, eyes. From outside in, do beings magnify under the dome? Lepidoptera. From the Greek:Scale-wing. Chrysalis. Stay, butterfly, under the dome.

for José Eulogio Garrido Like priestly imprisoned poets, the poplars of blood have fallen asleep. On the hills, the flocks of Bethlehem chew arias of grass at sunset. The ancient shepherd, who shivers at the last martyrdoms of light, in his Easter eyes has caught a purebred flock of stars. Formed in orphanhood, he goes down with rumors of burial to the praying field, and the sheep bells are seasoned with shadow. It survives, the blue warped in iron, and on it, pupils shrouded, a dog etches its pastoral howl.

We have all seen them circling pastures, have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing, the fences of our own backyards, and have stood amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift. But I had never seen so many so close, hundreds, every limb of the dead oak feathered black, and I cut the engine, let the river grab the jon boat and pull it toward the tree. The black leaves shined, the pink fruit blossomed red, ugly as a human heart. Then, as I passed under their dream, I saw for the first time its soft countenance, the raw fleshy jowls wrinkled and generous, like the faces of the very old who have grown to empathize with everything. And I drifted away from them, slow, on the pull of the river, reluctant, looking back at their roost, calling them what I'd never called them, what they are, those dwarfed transfiguring angels, who flock to the side of the poisoned fox, the mud turtle crushed on the shoulder of the road, who pray over the leaf-graves of the anonymous lost, with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings.

coming from a place where we meandered mornings and met quail, scrub jay, mockingbird, i knew coyote, like everyone else, i knew 
cactus, knew tumbleweed, lichen on the rocks and pill bugs beneath, rattlers sometimes, the soft smell of sage and the ferment of cactus pear. coming from this place, from a place where grass might grow greener on the hillside in winter than in any yard, where, the whole rest of the year, everything i loved, chaparral pea, bottle brush tree, jacaranda, mariposa, pinyon and desert oak, the kumquat in the back garden and wisteria vining the porch, the dry grass whispering long after the last rains, raccoons in and out of the hills, trash hurled by the hottest wind, the dry grass tall now and golden, lawn chairs, 
eucalyptus, everything, in a place we knew, every thing, we knew, little and large and mine and ours, except horror, all of it, everything could flame up that quickly, could flare and be gone.