1630 Nature poems

And now, the horse is entering the sea, and the sea holds it. Where are we? Behind us, the beach, yes, its scrim, yes, of grass, dune, sky—Desire goes by, and though it’s wind of course making the grass bend, unbend, we say it’s desire again, passing us by, souveniring us with gospel the grass, turned choir, leans into, Coming— Lord, soon.

For Pat Gourneau, my grandfather The heron makes a cross flying low over the marsh. Its heart is an old compass pointing off in four directions. It drags the world along, the world it becomes. My face surfaces in the green beveled glass above the washstand. My handprint in thick black powder on the bedroom shade. Home I could drink like thin fire that gathers like lead in my veins, heart’s armor, the coffee stains. In the dust of the double hollyhock, Theresa, one frail flame eating wind. One slim candle that snaps in the dry grass. Ascending tall ladders that walk to the edge of dusk. Riding a blue cricket through the tumult of the falling dawn. At dusk the gray owl walks the length of the roof, sharpening its talons on the shingles. Grandpa leans back between spoonfuls of canned soup and repeats to himself a word that belongs to a world no one else can remember. The day has not come when from sloughs, the great salamander lumbers through snow, salt, and fire to be with him, throws the hatchet of its head through the door of the three-room house and eats the blue roses that are peeling off the walls. Uncle Ray, drunk for three days behind the jagged window of a new government box, drapes himself in fallen curtains, and dreams that the odd beast seen near Cannonball, North Dakota, crouches moaning at the door to his body. The latch is the small hook and eye. of religion. Twenty nuns fall through clouds to park their butts on the metal hasp. Surely that would be considered miraculous almost anyplace, but here in the Turtle Mountains it is no more than common fact. Raymond wakes, but he can’t shrug them off. He is looking up dark tunnels of their sleeves, and into their frozen armpits, or is it heaven? He counts the points of their hairs like stars. One by one they blink out, and Theresa comes forth clothed in the lovely hair she has been washing all day. She smells like a hayfield, drifting pollen of birch trees. Her hair steals across her shoulders like a postcard sunset. All the boys tonight, goaded from below, will approach her in The Blazer, The Tomahawk, The White Roach Bar where everyone gets up to cut the rug, wagging everything they got, as the one bass drum of The Holy Greaseballs lights a depth charge through the smoke. Grandpa leans closer to the bingo. The small fortune his heart pumps for is hidden in the stained, dancing numbers. The Ping-Pong balls rise through colored lights, brief as sparrows God is in the sleight of the woman’s hand. He walks from Saint Ann’s, limp and crazy as the loon that calls its children across the lake in its broke, knowing laughter. Hitchhiking home from the Mission, if he sings, it is a loud, rasping wail that saws through the spine of Ira Comes Last, at the wheel. Drawn up through the neck ropes, drawn out of his stomach by the spirit of the stones that line the road and speak to him only in their old agreement. Ira knows the old man is nuts. Lets him out at the road that leads up over stars and the skulls of white cranes. And through the soft explosions of cattail and the scattering of seeds on still water, walks Grandpa, all the time that there is in his hands that have grown to be the twisted doubles of the burrows of mole and badger, that have come to be the absence of birds in a nest. Hands of earth, of this clay I’m also made from.

1 It is calm. It is as though we lived in a garden that had not yet arrived at the knowledge of good and evil. But there is a man in it. 2 There will be rain falling vertically from an indifferent sky. There will stare out from behind its bars the face of the man who is not enjoying it. 3 Nothing higher than a blackberry bush. As the sun comes up fresh, what is the darkness stretching from horizon to horizon? It is the shadow here of the forked man. 4 We have eaten the blackberries and spat out the seeds, but they lie glittering like the eyes of a man. 5 After we have stopped singing, the garden is disturbed by echoes; it is the man whistling, expecting everything to come to him. 6 We wipe our beaks on the branches wasting the dawn’s jewellery to get rid of the taste of a man. 7 Neverthless, which is not the case with a man, our bills give us no trouble. 8 Who said the number was unlucky? It was a man, who, trying to pass us, had his licence endorsed thirteen times. 9 In the cool of the day the garden seems given over to blackbirds. Yet we know also that somewhere there is a man in hiding. 10 To us there are eggs and there are blackbirds. But there is the man, too, trying without feathers to incubate a solution. 11 We spread our wings, reticulating our air-space. A man stands under us and worries at his ability to do the same. 12 When night comes like a visitor from outer space we stop our ears lest we should hear tell of the man in the moon. 13 Summer is at an end. The migrants depart. When they return in spring to the garden, will there be a man among them?

Falling leaves and falling men! When the snows of winter fall, And the winds of winter blows, Will be woven Nature’s pall. Let us, then, forsake our dead; For the dead will surely wait While we rush upon the foe, Eager for the hero’s fate. Leaves will come upon the trees; Spring will show the happy race; Mothers will give birth to sons— Loyal souls to fill our place. Wherefore should we rest and rush? Soldiers, we must fight and save Freedom now, and give our foes All their country should—a grave!

Well, honest John, how fare you now at home? The spring is come, and birds are building nests; The old cock-robin to the sty is come, With olive feathers and its ruddy breast; And the old cock, with wattles and red comb, Struts with the hens, and seems to like some best, Then crows, and looks about for little crumbs, Swept out by little folks an hour ago; The pigs sleep in the sty; the bookman comes— The little boy lets home-close nesting go, And pockets tops and taws, where daisies blow, To look at the new number just laid down, With lots of pictures, and good stories too, And Jack the Giant-killer's high renown.

The host's girlfriend is barely seen. She's busy giving away wild animals to reluctant guests. I agree to take a snake-dog, maybe an electric eel, but when I feel its sharp teeth in my shoulder, I start to worry about the future welfare of our fragile cat, the precarious order of our rented home, and remember I am supposed to be looking for someone.... A half-wolf, half-elephant cracks through the walls of the peeling wallpapered bedroom where my former student in a fuschia robe and curlers sits by a lighted make-up mirror. The shadows off elongated fake eyelashes are as dark as the branches of an evening tree. The hovering body of a fiery sparrow is almost transparent, like flute music or an idea. I turn my back and finally, I spot her my friend, the host. She's sipping rum punch from a martini glass; her whole body appears to be smiling, glowing, and I don't know what to think. I know she doesn't drink, hasn't in decades, and I wonder what's suddenly changed, but then I remember the cancer won, my friend isn't actually here, there is no party, there was never a house.

Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come, For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom, And the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest, And love is burning diamonds in my true lover's breast; She sits beneath the whitethorn a-plaiting of her hair, And I will to my true lover with a fond request repair; I will look upon her face, I will in her beauty rest, And lay my aching weariness upon her lovely breast. The clock-a-clay is creeping on the open bloom of May, The merry bee is trampling the pinky threads all day, And the chaffinch it is brooding on its grey mossy nest In the whitethorn bush where I will lean upon my lover's breast; I'll lean upon her breast and I'll whisper in her ear That I cannot get a wink o'sleep for thinking of my dear; I hunger at my meat and I daily fade away Like the hedge rose that is broken in the heat of the day.

When clouds turn heavy, rich and mottled as an oyster bed, when the temperature drops so fast that fog conjures itself inside the cars, as if the parking lots were filled with row upon row of lovers, when my umbrella veils my face and threatens to reverse itself at every gust of wind, and rain lashes my legs and the hem of my skirt, but I am walking to meet a man who’ll buy me coffee and kiss my fingers— what can be more beautiful, then, than these boys sprinting through the storm, laughing, shouldering the rain aside, running to their dorms, perhaps to class, carrying, like torches, their useless shoes?

The wind that makes your hair grow faster opens a child’s mouth full of strawberry and sand. Slow and sure on the scales of the ocean the child’s head outweighs the sun. Inside of the wind— a blister of a church, its walls thicker than the space from wall to wall where the wind shifts shade and light like two rival chess pieces or two unmatched pieces of furniture. Inside of the church—such a stillness that when a feather floats down in a fist of dust it becomes a rock by the time it hits the ground. Organ pipes glint like a cold radiator, contained in a case of a carved tree, its branches tied up with a snake. Organ pedals, golden and plump, are the tree’s only fruit. It is all about the release of weight: the player crushes the pedals like grapes underneath his feet. My body, like an inaccurate cashier, adds your weight to itself. Your name, called into the wind, slows the wind down. When a body is ripe, it falls and rots from the softest spot. Only when a child slips and drops off a tree, the tree suddenly learns that it is barren.

(excerpt) Thou know’st my praise of nature most sincere, And that my raptures are not conjur’d up To serve occasions of poetic pomp, But genuine, and art partner of them all. How oft upon yon eminence our pace Has slacken’d to a pause, and we have borne The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew, While admiration, feeding at the eye, And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene. Thence with what pleasure have we just discern’d The distant plough slow-moving, and beside His lab’ring team, that swerv’d not from the track, The sturdy swain diminish’d to a boy! Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o’er, Conducts the eye along its sinuous course Delighted.  There, fast rooted in his bank, Stand, never overlook’d, our fav’rite elms, That screen the herdsman’s solitary hut; While far beyond, and overthwart the stream That as with molten glass inlays the vale, The sloping land recedes into the clouds; Displaying on its varied side the grace Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tow’r, Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells Just undulates upon the list’ning ear, Groves, heaths, and smoking villages remote. Scenes must be beautiful which daily view’d Please daily, and whose novelty survives Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years. Praise justly due to those that I describe. . . . But though true worth and virtue, in the mild And genial soil of cultivated life Thrive most, and may perhaps thrive only there, Yet not in cities oft.  In proud and gay And gain-devoted cities; thither flow, As to a common and most noisome sewer, The dregs and fæculence of ev’ry land. In cities foul example on most minds Begets its likeness.  Rank abundance breeds In gross and pamper’d cities sloth and lust, And wantonness and gluttonous excess. In cities, vice is hidden with most ease, Or seen with least reproach; and virtue, taught By frequent lapse, can hope no triumph there Beyond th’ atchievement of successful flight. I do confess them nurs’ries of the arts, In which they flourish most: where, in the beams Of warm encouragement, and in the eye Of public note, they reach their perfect size. Such London is, by taste and wealth proclaim’d The fairest capital of all the world, By riot and incontinence the worst. There, touch’d by Reynolds, a dull blank becomes A lucid mirror, in which Nature sees All her reflected features.  Bacon there Gives more than female beauty to a stone, And Chatham’s eloquence to marble lips. . . . God made the country, and man made the town: What wonder then, that health and virtue, gifts That can alone make sweet the bitter draught That life holds out to all, should most abound And least be threaten’d in the fields and groves? Possess ye therefore, ye who, borne about In chariots and sedans, know no fatigue But that of idleness, and taste no scenes But such as art contrives, possess ye still Your element; there only ye can shine, There only minds like yours can do no harm. Our groves were planted to console at noon The pensive wand’rer in their shades.  At eve The moon-beam, sliding softly in between The sleeping leaves, is all the light they wish, Birds warbling all the music.  We can spare The splendour of your lamps, they but eclipse Our softer satellite. Your songs confound Our more harmonious notes: the thrush departs Scar’d, and th’ offended nightingale is mute. There is a public mischief in your mirth, It plagues your country.  Folly such as your’s, Grac’d with a sword, and worthier of a fan, Has made, which enemies could ne’er have done, Our arch of empire, steadfast but for you, A mutilated structure, soon to fall.