1630 Nature poems

I. MORPHO MENELAUS Foiled acqua- moiré wings the butterfly’s beauty- mark hydraulic in its purposes   his hair’s flame lifts you snarls you II. MORPHO ACHILLES Sea-bed in semaphore / an eyepiece     wing-span delft dye vat-dipped shingle scintilla        :        truant and acclimate     enfold or infuriate:     SOS: Don’t surround Don’t surround yourself with yourself III. MORPHO RHETENOR HELENA Neon heather sky- lit bluer than moiré: inseam of street trash     lush mask- contour     soul- strait fungible as raiment in the crawlspace     radiating amatory birds’ egg bulls-eye

East will take me back. I drive west. I wend between snowbanks, until the road delivers me to a sleeping boat launch. They stand on the frozen ramp; watch me with coats that are better than mine. Ice houses and snowmobiles edge the distance. I have to turn around, I say to them,I went the wrong way. They stamp and chuff. No, they tell me,this is the way.

Three flies, woken by the sun on a white, illuminated wall, leap like the hands of a florist wrapping bouquets. They remind me of a knife thrower, who performs with five in the air. Is the quantity restricted? Catch and don’t think. Weigh me. I’ll run away from you like water and press you like ice if you sizzle too much. Look at them on the white wall. Three trees from the new shoots of a cedar. From the corner of a cube. And, if you look closely, from a gully. Translated from the Slovenian

(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.