1630 Nature poems

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.

If walking, like wine, only abets a sad mood let’s try it, I said, and I did: over these hills that have never known sorrow no thoughtful moon passes. Dig until a hill is level, and unearth only earth. Take pride in knowing the chemical makeup of rain, the sum total of harmful vapors in any sunset. For if you must drag in the old lines about suicidal willows, star’s stacked for or against you, you clutter a limitless, soaring landscape with your own baggage. Night of love, day of omens of night, great mountain of realized hopes, valley where bitter winds blow the dispossessed into raving lunatics— what are they but shady projections of passing whims, vastly oversimplified versions of something infinitely greater? This vision before you is nothing but a triad of trees, hills, river, steadfast and eternal. But soon you start to feel restless and when, setting out to take a roll of photos, you note the disturbing absence of a road, your suavity crumbles: you deafen the sky and serenade the moon, fall prostrate before pines saying oh, come back, spirit of the place which, lifeless without you, blossoms into something sumptuously more than mediating madness; come back, massive oaks that await our coming; to carve initials is to be truly human; the days are dappled with our passions, the mountains rise and fall with our glories and follies.

I will not tend. Or water, pull, or yank, I will not till, uproot, fill up or spray. The rain comes. Or not. Plants: sun-fed, moon-hopped, dirt-stuck. Watch as flocks of wild phlox appear, disappear. My lazy, garbagey magic makes this nothing happen. I love the tattered camisole of nothing. The world runs its underbrush course fed by the nothing I give it. Wars are fought. Blood turns. Dirt is a wide unruly room.

It was a flower once, it was one of a billion flowers whose perfume broke through closed car windows, forced a blessing on their drivers. Then what stayed behind grew swollen, as we do; grew juice instead of tears, and small hard sour seeds, each one bitter, as we are, and filled with possibility. Now a hole opens up in its skin, where it was torn from the branch; ripeness can’t stop itself, breathes out; we can’t stop it either. We breathe in.

I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets under the trees, catching the rain of  olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness of   the one covering the bad roof of  a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color inside the winter’s weeks. Another one took the shape of   the pile of   bricks underneath. Another flew off the back of a truck, black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air. I have seen the ones under bridges, the forms they make of sleep. I could go on this way until the end of the page, even though what I have in my mind isn’t the thing itself, but the category of   belief that sees the thing as a shelter for what is beneath it. There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over a wave. You cannot put a tarp over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken oil well miles under the ocean. There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind that sits in a corner and shreds receipts and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread, whose only recourse is language so approximate it hardly means what it means: He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember her name. He is old. He is ashamed.

Teach me, old World, your passion of slow change, Your calm of stars, watching the turn of earth, Patient of man, and never thinking strange The mad red crash of each new system’s birth. Teach me, for I would know your beauty’s way That waits and changes with each changing sun, No dawn so fair but promises a day Of other perfectness than men have won. Teach me, old World, not as vain men have taught, —Unpatient song, nor words of hollow brass, Nor men’s dismay whose powerfullest thought Is woe that they and worlds alike must pass. Nothing I learn by any mortal rule; Teach me, old World, I would not be man’s fool.

Tell the bees. They require news of the house; they must know, lest they sicken from the gap between their ignorance and our grief. Speak in a whisper. Tie a black swatch to a stick and attach the stick to their hive. From the fortress of casseroles and desserts built in the kitchen these past few weeks as though hunger were the enemy, remove a slice of cake and lay it where they can slowly draw it in, making a mournful sound. And tell the fly that has knocked on the window all day. Tell the redbird that rammed the glass from outside and stands too dazed to go. Tell the grass, though it's already guessed, and the ground clenched in furrows; tell the water you spill on the ground, then all the water will know. And the last shrunken pearl of snow in its hiding place. Tell the blighted elms, and the young oaks we plant instead. The water bug, while it scribbles a hundred lines that dissolve behind it. The lichen, while it etches deeper its single rune. The boulders, letting their fissures widen, the pebbles, which have no more to lose, the hills—they will be slightly smaller, as always, when the bees fly out tomorrow to look for sweetness and find their way because nothing else has changed.

Here is the place; right over the hill Runs the path I took; You can see the gap in the old wall still, And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook. There is the house, with the gate red-barred, And the poplars tall; And the barn’s brown length, and the cattle-yard, And the white horns tossing above the wall. There are the beehives ranged in the sun; And down by the brink Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o’errun, Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink. A year has gone, as the tortoise goes, Heavy and slow; And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows, And the same brook sings of a year ago. There ’s the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze; And the June sun warm Tangles his wings of fire in the trees, Setting, as then, over Fernside farm. I mind me how with a lover’s care From my Sunday coat I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair, And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat. Since we parted, a month had passed,— To love, a year; Down through the beeches I looked at last On the little red gate and the well-sweep near. I can see it all now,—the slantwise rain Of light through the leaves, The sundown’s blaze on her window-pane, The bloom of her roses under the eaves. Just the same as a month before,— The house and the trees, The barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door,— Nothing changed but the hives of bees. Before them, under the garden wall, Forward and back, Went drearily singing the chore-girl small, Draping each hive with a shred of black. Trembling, I listened: the summer sun Had the chill of snow; For I knew she was telling the bees of one Gone on the journey we all must go! Then I said to myself, “My Mary weeps For the dead to-day: Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps The fret and the pain of his age away.” But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill, With his cane to his chin, The old man sat; and the chore-girl still Sung to the bees stealing out and in. And the song she was singing ever since In my ear sounds on:— “Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence! Mistress Mary is dead and gone!”

a netless somersault, the trapeze swing disappears in disheveled clouds among cumulus sheep, birds, rowboat the feather on the Joseph Cornell narrow shelf, unruffled as the one we pocketed from the grass in a nearby park to share week by week her house mine but soon forgot and it sat on her dresser maybe sits there still elsewhere, heat, light, a shut-eye bat hangs, a limp cyclamen stem straightens, an avocado ripens, a grapefruit tree in a winter kitchen leafs out of season. Wednesday is a calendar X, Thursday, Friday, the impulse: turn inward start with near then far. narrow then broad. wayward then homebound, that, too, is near then far, inward. rate the prospects 1 to 10, Yelp the day 1- to 4-star: accommodations, host, did it match the advertised expectation the box on your lap, open it up. open your lap, open it up and your arms,a is for arm.b is for box,c connection, go on, break the seal, unfold the replacement net