1630 Nature poems

The source I thought was Arctic the good Platonic Up the pole was soaked film an electric elevation onto a fishy platform and waves on two sides greenly welcoming The sunwater poured on holy atheism It was light that powered out my ego or my heart before ending with a letter

Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile. — E. O. Wilson I returned to a stand of pines, bone-thin phalanx flanking the roadside, tangle of understory—a dialectic of dark and light—and magnolias blossoming like afterthought: each flower a surrender, white flags draped among the branches. I returned to land’s end, the swath of coast clear cut and buried in sand: mangrove, live oak, gulfweed razed and replaced by thin palms— palmettos—symbols of victory or defiance, over and over marking this vanquished land. I returned to a field of cotton, hallowed ground— as slave legend goes—each boll holding the ghosts of generations: those who measured their days by the heft of sacks and lengths of rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plants still sewn into our clothes. I returned to a country battlefield where colored troops fought and died— Port Hudson where their bodies swelled and blackened beneath the sun—unburied until earth’s green sheet pulled over them, unmarked by any headstones. Where the roads, buildings, and monuments are named to honor the Confederacy, where that old flag still hangs, I return to Mississippi, state that made a crime of me—mulatto, half-breed—native in my native land, this place they’ll bury me.

After the whey-faced anonymity Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush, After the rubbing and the hit of brush, You come to the South Country As if the argument of trees were done, The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains, All ended by these clear and gliding planes Like an abrupt solution. And over the flat earth of empty farms The monstrous continent of air floats back Coloured with rotting sunlight and the black, Bruised flesh of thunderstorms: Air arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge, Ditches and hutches, with a drench of light, So huge, from such infinities of height, You walk on the sky’s beach While even the dwindled hills are small and bare, As if, rebellious, buried, pitiful, Something below pushed up a knob of skull, Feeling its way to air.

A storm and so a gift. Its swift approach lifts gravel from the road. A fence is flattened in the course of   the storm’s worse attempt at language — thunder’s umbrage. A tree is torn apart, blown upward through a bedroom window. A boy winnows through the pile of shards for the sharpest parts from the blown-apart glass. He has a bag that holds found edges jagged as a stag’s horns or smooth as a single pane smashed into smaller panes that he sticks his hand into to make blood web across his ache-less skin flexing like fish gills O-lipped for a scream it cannot make. He wants to feel what his friends have felt, the slant of fear on their faces he could never recreate, his body configured without pain. When his skin’s pouting welts don’t rake a whimper from his mouth, he runs outside, arms up for the storm, aluminum baseball bat held out to the sky until lightning with an electric tongue makes his viscera luminescent; the boy’s first word for pain is the light’s new word for home.

Water-flesh gleamed like mica: orange fins, red flankspots, a char shy as ginseng, found only in spring-flow gaps, the thin clear of faraway creeks no map could name. My cousin showed me those hidden places. I loved how we found them, the way we followed no trail, just stream-sound tangled in rhododendron, to where slow water opened a hole to slip a line in, and lift as from a well bright shadows of another world, held in my hand, their color already starting to fade.

Housed in a boom of blubber & bone, harpooned six times, the giant grew into a dynamo hitched to six taut rope-lines skipping the boat across waves toward the blurry lighthouse. It bled out a long silence but men in oilskins labored with hydraulics of light on water, walked its flank, & tore it down to a storeroom of Nantucket scrimshaw. Ballast stone or sledge? They bashed in the skull & lowered down the boy to haul up buckets of oil for candles that burned a slow, clean, white glow. At ten, he was almost a man whose feet sank into the waxy muck of ambergris. His sweat dripped into a long hour. Big as a barrel, the head echoed a temple nave.

I The spider expects the cold of winter. When the shadows fall in long Autumn He congeals in a nest of paper, prepares The least and minimal existence, Obedient to nature. No other course Is his; no other availed him when In high summer he spun and furled The gaudy catches. I am that spider, Caught in nature, summer and winter. You are the symbol of the seasons too. II Now to expatiate and temporize This artful brag. I never saw so quieting A sight as the dawn, dew-clenched foot- Wide web hung on summer barn-eaves, spangled. It moves to zephyrs that is tough as steel. I never saw so finely-legged a creature Walk so accurate a stretch as he, Proud, capable, patient, confident. To the eye he gave close penetration Into real myth, the myth of you, of me. III Yet, by moving eyesight off from this There is another dimension. Near the barn, Down meadow to shingle, no place for spiders, The sea in large blue breathes in brainstorm tides, Pirates itself away to ancient Spain, Pirouettes past Purgatory to Paradise. Do I feed deeper on a spider, A close-hauled view upon windless meaning, Or deeper a day or dance or doom bestride On ocean’s long reach, on parables of God?

three times the snake appeared before me & like a gun said follow when you hear fire keep your body close to the ground the snake said point blank I am here for your protection I don’t have a trigger but I have a tongue to your neck to your ear to your temple follow me down the barrel three shots to steady ready the gray-eyed snake spit warming its body along the crack you can’t go back from where you are unarmed handle the snake the way you handle a gun at your belt with a glove spirit guide the gun away from the body follow each bone as it moves up & down the back

Hair rush, low swoop— so those of us stuck here on earth know—you must be gods. Or friends of gods, granted chances to push off into sky, granted chances to hear so well your own voice bounced back to you maps the night. Each hinge in your wing’s an act of creation. Each insect you snick out of air a witness. You transform obstacles into sounds, then dodge them.

Walking among my own this windy morning In a tide of sunlight between shower and shower, I resume my old conspiracy with the wet Stone and the unwieldy images of the squinting heart. Once more, as before, I remember not to forget. There is a perverse pride in being on the side Of the fallen angels and refusing to get up. We could all be saved by keeping an eye on the hill At the top of every street, for there it is, Eternally, if irrelevantly, visible — But yield instead to the humorous formulae, The spurious mystery in the knowing nod; Or we keep sullen silence in light and shade, Rehearsing our astute salvations under The cold gaze of a sanctimonious God. One part of my mind must learn to know its place. The things that happen in the kitchen houses And echoing back streets of this desperate city Should engage more than my casual interest, Exact more interest than my casual pity.