1630 Nature poems

(Kyoto) CONFIDENCE (after Bashō) Clouds murmur darkly, it is a blinding habit— gazing at the moon. TIME OF JOY (after Buson) Spring means plum blossoms and spotless new kimonos for holiday whores. RENDEZVOUS (after Shiki) Once more as I wait for you, night and icy wind melt into cold rain. FOR SATORI In the spring of joy, when even the mud chuckles, my soul runs rabid, snaps at its own bleeding heels, and barks: “What is happiness?” SOMBER GIRL She never saw fire from heaven or hotly fought with God; but her eyes smolder for Hiroshima and the cold death of Buddha.

The fields are infertile as far as I can tell. Their winter systems sparkle like the diamonds that pelt Neptune. Limpid silvers reflect in the dark museums and theaters back in town. To them we run to elevate our eyes to a well-shaped ethics. Colors are supplied by our nervous minds. • Towards a just and invisible image behind each substance and its place in a sentence you must have been walking. Well-defended, best when lost from wanting. Be like grass, she told me, lie flat, spring up. • We drop the shadows where they are then return to them when the light has grown heavy. You’ll take your time lugging the weight into our room. Or stand over there in the shade. We’ve never been too sure that we exist as the earth does. We’re most at home in water that soaks up the letters in our brains. It could be we have been dry too long. A spirit is a mess when excess spoils it. • I see them through the slats and crack of the open window. A cold rain. Leaves flipped and palsied. The river is brown near the sand, loose banks and twigs stick at the edge and a lilac’s silhouette of a child I love. How in the dark hole can I hide if   I can’t get outside? Then I won’t remember what I did to deserve it. That arch and bridge will form a shape of repentance. If  I’m hanging, then judgment has been passed. And I am hanging upside down head swinging towards the moon. Years of  inversion. A face in a mirror displaced by its position outside silver. And so? Next will come muscle, a little grief   but no shoulder. • You’re learning how to be a unit with an infinite in its attic. It’s not difficult. Light is the last message. White streaks like oil paint are the first to appear along the wet railing. Next similar colors correspond by chance. We would rather be (die) with total strangers than with partial ones we realized in the elevator going down. It was the only time that day that we were as alone as we were awake. Sensing a just and impartial ghost close to each living thing I could see the genius of  institutional religion. Examine your conscience. Confess in darkness and take away a task. Soon you’ll wash off flesh scented by its parallel past. What were your feet thinking in their hurry to connect the parts? Get the children to the other side! What children? You were the one running. There was never any other.

When Winter's ahead, What can you read in November That you read in April When Winter's dead? I hear the thrush, and I see Him alone at the end of the lane Near the bare poplar's tip, Singing continuously. Is it more that you know Than that, even as in April, So in November, Winter is gone that must go? Or is all your lore Not to call November November, And April April, And Winter Winter—no more? But I know the months all, And their sweet names, April, May and June and October, As you call and call I must remember What died into April And consider what will be born Of a fair November; And April I love for what It was born of, and November For what it will die in, What they are and what they are not, While you love what is kind, What you can sing in And love and forget in All that's ahead and behind.

The mockingbird says, hallelujah, coreopsis, I make the day bright, I wake the night-blooming jasmine. I am the duodecimo of desperate love, the hocus pocus passion flower of delirious retribution. You never saw such a bird, such a triage of blood and feathers, tongue and bone. O the world is a sad address, bitterness melting the tongues of babies, breasts full of accidental milk, but I can teach the flowers to grow, take their tight buds, unfurl them like flags in the morning heat, fat banners of scent, flat platters of riot on the emerald scene. I am the green god of pine trees, conducting the music of rustling needles through a harp of wind. I am the heart of men, the wild bird that drives their sex, forges their engines, jimmies their shattered locks in the dark flare where midnight slinks. I am the careless minx in the skirts of women, the bright moon caressing their hair, the sharp words pouring from their beautiful mouths in board rooms, on bar stools, in big city laundrettes. I am Lester Young’s sidewinding sax, sending that Pony Express message out west in the Marconi tube hidden in every torso tied tight in the corset of do and don’t, high and low, yes and no. I am the radio, first god of the twentieth century, broadcasting the news, the blues, the death counts, the mothers wailing when everyone’s gone home. I am sweeping through the Eustachian tubes of the great plains, transmitting through every ear of corn, shimmying down the spine of every Bible-thumping banker and bureaucrat, relaying the anointed word of the shimmering world. Every dirty foot that walks the broken streets moves on my wings. I speak from the golden screens. Hear the roar of my discord murdering the trees, screaming its furious rag, the fuselage of my revival-tent brag. Open your windows, slip on your castanets. I am the flamenco in the heel of desire. I am the dancer. I am the choir. Hear my wild throat crowd the exploding sky. O I can make a noise.

Not gigan-tic. Not roman-tic. Not artis-tic. Not majes-tic. Not magne-tic. Nor aesthe-tic. Ticks are strictly parasi-tic.

Moringa of the flood bed on the banks of the river Tigris. A dove on a swaying bough's mournful cooing has turned me sad, Her song like the song of the queen of the gathering— When she touches her triple chord you can forget the maestro brother of the caliph al-Hádi! And when she sings!—who was Ánjash that camel driver with the mesmerizing chant, anyway? In Hadimát, Sálma's direction, and Sindád, I swear it, I'm in love, far gone, with a girl who lives in Ájyadi. Wrong, she lives in the obsidian black of the membrane of my liver. Through her, in a rush of musk and saffron, beauty falls into disarray.

I can’t tell you I had climbed for hours on ledges and crawled through gaps in the earth. My hands negotiating through the teeth of the palisade lipped under the vineyard of temperate skies. And I can’t tell you that I came onto a ledge within the shelter of a granite roof, ceaselessly carved by centuries of dripping water. Feeding from pooled water and singular sunlight a chamisa plant sat like a chopped wood. The opposite end of root speaking for its entirety through silence and color. And I wish I could tell you that at the moment I met its splitting scent under the enormity of stone your name appeared in my throat with clarity. And I wish we were old and in front of a grand painting, a picture or postcard of Picasso’s “Guernica” perhaps. It would be then that I would tell you Picasso once said that it took him his entire life to learn how to paint like a child. It would be through these words that would make you understand the same clarity that pooled over me on that ledge those years before when as a young man I extended like direction, like timbre itself for a dying song that echoed your name.

In a patch of sunlight a decapitated grasshopper twitches. The sunlight twitches. Sky the size of a sky imagined. Squint to see the quarter moon —shallow gash on blue horizon. Squint to hear beyond windows wafting muzak. I’m half-awake in this field of turned-on particulars. A wreck of yellow blossoms under a barn-door window. A barn door without the barn.

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun, O'er which clouds are bright'ning, Thou dost float and run; Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. The pale purple even Melts around thy flight; Like a star of Heaven, In the broad day-light Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, Keen as are the arrows Of that silver sphere, Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflow'd. What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. Like a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: Like a high-born maiden In a palace-tower, Soothing her love-laden Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower: Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its a{:e}real hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view: Like a rose embower'd In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflower'd, Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves: Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain-awaken'd flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass. Teach us, Sprite or Bird, What sweet thoughts are thine: I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. Chorus Hymeneal, Or triumphal chant, Match'd with thine would be all But an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? With thy clear keen joyance Languor cannot be: Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee: Thou lovest: but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. Waking or asleep, Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Yet if we could scorn Hate, and pride, and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. Better than all measures Of delightful sound, Better than all treasures That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky! Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound? Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground? Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will, Those quivering wings composed, that music still! Leave to the nightingale her shady wood; A privacy of glorious light is thine; Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood Of harmony, with instinct more divine; Type of the wise who soar, but never roam; True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!