1630 Nature poems

No pitying/“Ah” for this one —Alan Shapiro No, nor a fierce hurrah for what it does without choice, for following the light for the same reason the light follows it. Just a thing rough to the touch, a face like a thousand ticks turning their backs, suckling at something you can’t see, and a body like a tag off the earth so that my child hands couldn’t tear it out from the overgrown lot next door. My palms raw with the shock of quills and spines. Its hold like spite, and ugly except when seen from a distance— a whole field of them by the highway, an 80-mile-per-hour view like a camera’s flash. All of them like halos without saints to weigh them down.

Raking lace at the fringe of the tide, raking with fingers the English and cutwork and French of the froth, with the negative black dwarf sun in her eye echo eye mirror eye, she, taking his fingers, English and Hebrew bones, bobbin bones, to lace with her own, said love, if you like, but abyss of light.

Australia. Phillip Island. The Tasman Sea. Dusk. The craggy coastline at low tide in fog. Two thousand tourists milling in the stands as one by one, and then in groups, the fairy penguins mass up on the sand like so much sea wrack and debris. And then, as on command, the improbable parade begins: all day they've been out fishing for their chicks, and now, somehow, they find them squawking in their burrows in the dunes, one by one, two by two, such comical solemnity, as wobbling by they catch our eager eyes until we're squawking, too, in English, French, and Japanese, Yiddish and Swahili, like some happy wedding party brought to tears by whatever in the ceremony repairs the rifts between us. The rain stops. The fog lifts. Stars. And we go home, less hungry, satisfied, to friends and family, regurgitating all we've heard and seen.

I tracked it through the one mind of  the woods. Its hoofprints pressed in snow were smallish hearts. Buck fawn: he let me come so near, take aim. Crouched against a fir, I was anything. Bush, stump, doe in estrus he could rut. Not his maimer, though, not his final thought. He stared me down until I shot him: low. Then the forest forgot he’d ever been. Nascent, there were signs: bonechip, spoor, frail hair. But no memory, wounded, wants to die. He hid in the dark timber, twice crossed the creek. Finally he lay heaving out last breaths. Dusk-cast shadow, he died where he was made. A bite of  heart sustains but is not him.

Selvakumar had waked too often to the shouts of dogs — come home too many times to an empty chicken coop, stray feathers where dinner was supposed to roost. Finding two dogs in his house one night, he slammed his door to trap them, gathered stones and — the flinging done — gibbeted the bodies from a tree. A week later, he woke in darkness, feeling himself swept down a black, stinking hole the way in Kansas City, Missouri, Inspector Daniel Collins, smacked by a surge of sewer-water, slipped from his safety line and clattered down a 28-inch pipe dark as the grave it seemed about to be. Waking from sound sleep that morning, wolfing a breakfast of high-fiber toast and raisin bran, Dan never dreamed a real nightmare would swallow him. Selvakumar — squeezed by his nightmare — screamed. One ear was deaf; both hands were numb; his legs, too weak to hold his weight, tongue lolling like a dead fish in his mouth the way Dan’s did as liquid filth shoved his head under, while — first thrashing and battering, then not — he rolled/banged/slithered through earth’s bowels in darkness worse than what seized Irmgard Holm’s left eye when, after cataract surgery, she groped for eye drops in the night, grabbed a Super Glue tube, and sealed her lid tight. Doctors took Selvakumar’s cash, and shook their heads. A village healer diagnosed, “The dogs cursed you.” To break the curse, friends caught a stray, named her Selvi — Repentance — wrapped her in an orange sari, and hung a purple garland on her neck. Selvakumar — all in white, but for a purple garland like his bride’s — felt his dead legs quiver as she edged toward him. Even as he pledged eternal love, he planned to wed a woman when his health returned. Unlike a two-legged wife, though, Selvi didn’t hound him about the marital act, didn’t demand a better sari or a bigger home, or nag as he grew more helpless every day. Easy to laugh, invoking Brad & Angelina, Pyramus & Thisbe. Still, on the night Selvakumar found himself rushing again down the dark hole, who can say that Selvi didn’t guide him — as Irmgard’s husband led her to the doctor who dissolved the glue and saved her eye — as Daniel’s cries led rescuers to him, twelve feet underground, two miles from where he began — as the son of Marjorie Potts Gaffrey (dead in her sleep at 99), by sprinkling his mother’s ashes in her favorite flower pot, led Marjorie to wake as an African violet, sun bright on her leaves as it was in Daniel’s and Irmgard’s eyes, the dew of morning like the feel, as Selvakumar lay dying in his bed, of Selvi’s tongue.

That sea we see of surfaces Turned upside down would be another world: A bone shop, soaked in pearl, a dumping- Ground for rarities, the sea-maws pumping Grecian garbage Roman cities hurled Seaward westward toward our faces. That sea would yield up secret farms, Gray-rotted by itself, encrusted thick With unimaginable wealth, the spoil Of deaf-mute drownings, the immemorial Dead, floating in a blue-green bailiwick Of nun-like plants waving arms. That sea will not turn over. See In its deepest keep, far from its shallow, The formal, hidden iceberg, slant, oblique With pregnancy below, thrust up its peak— Like ourselves in the water-beasted wallow, Caught in a cellular ecstasy. In the same vein, all flesh conceals Articulation’s fishnet, whose thread-bones (A metaphysic harp from sky to heel) Hang in the flesh that dangles from the creel Depending from the weedy Hand that owns All fishnets and all fishing reels. His answers breed a further question: The fingernails of scale a snake will shed In spring, coil after coil, on moistened clay, Though similar to the serpent wriggling away, Are but facsimiles, though not quite dead. Testing this, see how the rest shun Drying memorials to that race That mined our viewpoint in the Garden, Whose inching tape maneuvered in the sun To measure every guilty length of Eden. Man is an animal that needs a warden To frighten off the Master’s face, For even an idiot sees a world No tree or dog would dream of, finds a name For pain or absence of it, marries love Of one kind of another. In his grove, Insensible fruit trees and wild game Grow naturally, though he lies curled, The spit and image of our wish, Smoking a pipe, with an ice-cold Cola Clutched in one hand, and the Sundy funnies spread On both his knees. He’ll leave his lurching bed To throw hot jazz on an old victrola— A far cry from the primal fish Whose fine-boned spine our back remembers: The river bottoms, and the sea-silt soft As soup, the mudflats where night crawlers came, Tempted by the water tops to change the lame Arrangements, making of the air a loft Fitted to our brackish members, And out we clambered, eyeing land, Our moist eyes focused on the moron green, Hot on our backs abnormal dryness, shadow Forming in the seanets, seaweed into meadow, Finally landing at the foot of pine, Heavy with salty contraband While the birds beautifully beat blue On erect wings, as magically they soared, Feathered and efficient, from tallest trees to stake A claim so ravishing that now we undertake To map an area we once ignored, Still exiles from that upper view, For, mummers of the ocean’s Word, Our dry translations tidied from the deep, Bespeak its ancient languages. The salt Our tears and blood must harbor from its vault Is shed on every beach-head where we creep, Part man, dry fish, and wingless bird.

The magnolia before it blooms stands bare as a statue from antiquity or a shaved puss, it flowers first then greens. A pissed off dyke climbs into the branches to be held by an ancient indifference and both were me. Yet it’s possible I am a short bald man. That I am neither a big-bosomed wide-hipped pretty nor a short bald man. An antelope, an elk, a deer on this rug, a twiggy tree. The genderless squat figure, solo, blurry, hands on hips, that repeats. A plush life of winter and summer colors of flowers alongside tight checkered bands edging the broad green center where we look for each other, a woods, a pasture, a park, a yard, a median of grass set in a concrete mold situated within a pay lot. How it feels to stand outside a house at night whose lights are on. Whose lights are on.

If you’d seen the Gaillardots’ mullein in the Cedars of the Shouf; if you’d seen the Aleppo dock, red with iron, in Bcharre where the Adonis River’s said to run as red with what was thought his blood; if you’d seen the bearded oat in Burjein, the rayed white horehound in Tripoli; or maybe the milkwort in Ehden, as often I saw the strigose bellflower and the cyclamen, you might have been the more awed by a mallow-leaved bindweed in Aley on your way to the brunnera in Baalbek. The Mediterranean poppy in Nabatieh, Beirut mullein in nearby Baabda, connate Alexanders in Qadisha, fodder vetch in Zgharta, white rocket in Sour, Gypsywort in Marjeyoun, headed Ziziphora in Baakleen, bladder skullcap in Barouk. The viscid catchfly, ah, vying with bats at evening in Zahle—for these the earth of continuous habitation since the Chalcolithic Age salivates at dawn. But not a reed grows where no grave is. In Sacandaga Valley, two thousand bodies were trans-buried by the boneyard gang. They ceded the pitted ground to the dentist gang, whose jackhammers drilled the rock beneath. Powder monkeys tamped the holes with dynamite. The beaver-tooth gang’s axes and cross-cut saws cleared the trees. Bush burners followed. The fires burned for two years. The patience of dam builders built a force equal to the water: It flooded the ashes, the railroad station, and a train, which I saw transposed in the steely swells, or so it seemed. But iron turns a torrent red.

Castaways, we hit the forest — our camping stove turned low, I gripped my tent close for its trial in virgin attitudes of stiffness while lamps fluttered on the dark. My roof sank wave on wave accordion-like, the only sin we knew; and soon the Jameson appeared. I’d burned one back and by the third she laid her hand on mine, like a napkin ... Later, I caught those tiny gasps from Joan and Michael’s tent where he slipped into her like (this I thought) a frog à la Bashō; those dark rippling walls where she kept center, held her breath, so I had to puzzle how one could leave and neither be alone.

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; Or surely you'll grow double: Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble? The sun above the mountain's head, A freshening lustre mellow Through all the long green fields has spread, His first sweet evening yellow. Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music! on my life, There's more of wisdom in it. And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! He, too, is no mean preacher: Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher. She has a world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to bless— Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, Truth breathed by cheerfulness. One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect. Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives.