1630 Nature poems

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

To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language; for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts Of the last bitter hour come like a blight Over thy spirit, and sad images Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, And breathless darkness, and the narrow house, Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;— Go forth, under the open sky, and list To Nature’s teachings, while from all around— Earth and her waters, and the depths of air— Comes a still voice— Yet a few days, and thee The all-beholding sun shall see no more In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground, Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears, Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix for ever with the elements, To be a brother to the insensible rock And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould. Yet not to thine eternal resting-place Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings, The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good, Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, All in one mighty sepulchre.   The hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods—rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,— Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun, The planets, all the infinite host of heaven, Are shining on the sad abodes of death, Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread The globe are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness, Or lose thyself in the continuous woods Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound, Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there: And millions in those solitudes, since first The flight of years began, have laid them down In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone. So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw In silence from the living, and no friend Take note of thy departure? All that breathe Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave Their mirth and their employments, and shall come And make their bed with thee. As the long train Of ages glide away, the sons of men, The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes In the full strength of years, matron and maid, The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man— Shall one by one be gathered to thy side, By those, who in their turn shall follow them. So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

The grey sky, lighter & darker greys, lights between & delicate lavenders also blue-greys in smaller strokes, & swashes of mauve-grey on the Hudson— openings of light to the blue oblong off-center where the door to the warehouse shows— the larger smearings darkening deep into blues So alight that sky, late August, early evening, I had to gasp at it, stand there hardly moving to breathe it,       using whatever my body gave me, at that moment       attending to it, thinking: Turner, he should have seen it, he would have given it back to us, not let it die away And that other evening, walking down Bank Street from marketing, the sky fiery over the river, luminous but hot in its flowering also, rich in color as Venice seen by Guardi—more aflame even, the sky moving in a pulse, its fire breathing in a pulse verging on danger—mane of a lioness affronted. That brilliance—the eye of the lion filled to the lids with flame And his eyes, Turner's, that bright grey eye at seventy-six, "brilliant as the eye of a child" who grew his thumbnail in the shape of an eagle's claw, the better to use it in painting In Kirby Lonsdale, Yorkshire, where Turner first drew mountain-landscapes, I found Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell