1630 Nature poems

Fog swaddles the trunks and so delineates, from a vast of green, the silhouette of each pine on the slope. Maybe it’s like that, only all along it was obscured by what — rush, distraction? Fog. A pine. Querying grosbeak. Something shifts. You find yourself in another world you weren’t looking for where what you see is that you have always been the wolves at the door. Left ajar, gaping, your own door. And you burst in as the Mangler, you gouge out your right eye which hath offended. And you burst in as the Great Liar gorging on your own flesh and as Won’t Let Go who shreds your tendons, gnaws your femur. You can’t stop bursting in, coming upon yourself alone, vulnerable, in the privacy of your dying, bending to pick up with a tissue a crushed spider from the bedroom floor, half-sensing in your solar plexus the forces of that which cannot yet be sussed, discovering yourself once again already to have been inside something like an equation with a remainder, a deodand, a reminder of the impossibility of reconcilement — to what? Once again. Forgive yourself, they say, but after you forgive what you have lived, what is left? You can’t set aside the jigger of  the present from the steady pour of hours or even differentiate trails of ants scurrying through some massive subterranean network from the shredded remains of a galaxy backlit by star glow. Time to close the door you think but your face is changed, so many crow’s feet. You must be on to the next stage in which you begin to recognize your mortal body, that nexus of your various holds on the world, as repository of every- thing you didn’t know you took in, human and not, all of it charged and reactant which accounts for the trembling in your hands as now you discern the body of your body — like a still, hanging bell that catches and concentrates each ghostly, ambient reverberation.

Still, citizen sparrow, this vulture which you call Unnatural, let him but lumber again to air Over the rotten office, let him bear The carrion ballast up, and at the tall Tip of the sky lie cruising. Then you’ll see That no more beautiful bird is in heaven’s height, No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight; He shoulders nature there, the frightfully free, The naked-headed one. Pardon him, you Who dart in the orchard aisles, for it is he Devours death, mocks mutability, Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new. Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget How for so many bedlam hours his saw Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw, And the slam of his hammer all the day beset The people’s ears. Forget that he could bear To see the towns like coral under the keel, And the fields so dismal deep. Try rather to feel How high and weary it was, on the waters where He rocked his only world, and everyone’s. Forgive the hero, you who would have died Gladly with all you knew; he rode that tide To Ararat; all men are Noah’s sons.

We’d often been included in the weather, whose changes (as in the still, portending darknesses of after noon) were hardly evident, if even manifest at all. The August rain over Mixcoac & the deadening of all aspect at a distance: yet our sudden wet bodies, firm swelling divested finally of shirts & trousers, left beside turbid footprints on the tiled floor; this tongue, these lips the lightning over the unchartered landscape of your thigh: successive terra nova to resist the still life of the body

Stone gullets among       Inrush       Feed         Backsuck and The borders swallow            Outburst             Huge engorgements       Swallow In gulps the sea      Tide crams jagged         Smacks snorts chuckups       Follow In urgent thirst      Jaws the hollow      Insurge       Hollow Gushing evacuations follow       Jetty it must       Outpush       Greed

(In Memoriam: Charles Doughty, 1843-1926) Under no hanging heaven-rooted tree, Though full of mammuks’ nests, Bone of old Britain we bury thee But heeding your unspoken hests Naught not coeval with the Earth And indispensable till its end With what whom you despised may deem the dearth Of your last resting-place dare blend. Where nature is content with little so are you So be it the little to which all else is due. Nor in vain mimicry of the powers That lifted up the mountains shall we raise A stone less of nature’s shaping than of ours To mark the unfrequented place. You were not filial to all else Save to the Dust, the mother of all men, And where you lie no other sign needs tells (Unless a gaunt shape resembles you again In some momentary effect of light on rock) But your family likeness to all her stock. Flowers may be strewn upon the grave Of easy come easy go. Fitly only some earthquake or tidal wave O’er you its red rose or its white may throw But naught else smaller than darkness and light —Both here, though of no man’s bringing!— And as any past time had been in your sight Were you now from your bed upspringing, Now or a billion years hence, you would see Scant difference, eyed like eternity. How should we have anything to give you In death who had nothing in life, Attempting in our sand-riddles to sieve you Who were with nothing, but the sheer elements rife? Anchor of truth, facile as granite you lie, A plug suspended in England’s false dreams. Your worth will be seen by and by, Like God’s purpose in what men deem their schemes, Nothing ephemeral can seek what lies in this ground Since nothing can be sought but the found. The poem that would praise you must be Like the glass of some rock, sleek brown, crowded With dark incipient crystal growths, we see; Or a glimpse of Petavius may have endowed it With the tubular and dumb-bell-shaped inclusions surrounded By the broad reaction rims it needs. I have seen it in dreams and know how it abounded —Ah! would I could find in me like seeds!— As the north-easterly garden in the lunation grows, A spectacle not one man in ten millions knows. I belong to a different country than yours And none of my travels have been in the same lands Save where Arzachel or Langrenus allures Such spirits as ours, and the Straight Wall stands, But crossing shear planes extruded in long lines of ridges, Torsion cylinders, crater rings, and circular seas And ultra-basic xenoliths that make men look midges Belong to my quarter as well, and with ease I too can work in bright green and all the curious interference Colours that under crossed nicols have a mottled appearance. Let my first offering be these few pyroxenes twinned On the orthopinacoid and hour-glass scheme, Fine striae, microline cross-hatchings, and this wind Blowing plumes of vapour forever it would seem From cone after cone diminishing sterile and grey In the distance; dun sands in ever-changing squalls; Crush breccias and overthrusts; and such little array Of Geology’s favourite fal-de-lals And demolitions and entrenchments of weather As any turn of my eyes brings together. I know how on turning to noble hills And stark deserts happily still preserved For men whom no gregariousness fills With the loneliness for which they are nerved —The lonely at-one-ment with all worth while— I can feel as if the landscape and I Became each other and see my smile In the corners of the vastest contours lie And share the gladness and peace you knew, —The supreme human serenity that was you! I have seen Silence lift his head And Song, like his double, lift yours, And know, while nearly all that seems living is dead, You were always consubstantial with all that endures. Would it were on Earth! Not since Ezekiel has that faw sun ringed A worthier head; red as Adam you stood In the desert, the horizon with vultures black-winged, And sang and died in this still greater solitude Where I sit by your skull whose emptiness is worth The sum of almost all the full heads now on Earth —By your roomy skull where most men might well spend Longer than you did in Arabia, friend!

This is my advice to foreigners: call it simply—the river; never say old muddy or even Missouri, and except when it is necessary ignore the fact that it moves. It is the river, a singular, stationary figure of division. Do not allow the pre-Socratic to enter your mind except when thinking of clear water trout streams in north central Wyoming. The river is a variety of land, a kind of dark sea or great bay, sea of greater ocean. At times I find it good discipline to think of it as a tree rooted in the delta, a snake on its topmost western branch. These hills are not containers; they give no vantage but that looking out is an act of transit. We are not confused, we do not lose our place.

Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads, Great, hollow, bell-like flowers, Rumbling in the wind, Stretching clappers to strike our ears . . . Full-lipped flowers Bitten by the sun Bleeding rain Dripping rain like golden honey— And the sweet earth flying from the thunder.

But now it’s raining below the greener clouds of trees that were absorbent but only up to a point. And these raindrops strained by treetops should (you would think) be filtered and finer and therefore pure (and not Chinese water torture’s fatter, darker drops that always pick out of all possible bull’s-eyes your bald spot). But these are late, last drops and a little bloated like late, last poems by name your poet.

Like people emerging from a steambath, bending over, steaming from their heads and shoulders, the ring of the mountains from the Chilkat Range to the Juneau ice field as if in steambath towels of snow flurries; at their feet are foaming white caps of sea like water thrown on rocks steaming from the heat.

People are putting up storm windows now, Or were, this morning, until the heavy rain Drove them indoors. So, coming home at noon, I saw storm windows lying on the ground, Frame-full of rain; through the water and glass I saw the crushed grass, how it seemed to stream Away in lines like seaweed on the tide Or blades of wheat leaning under the wind. The ripple and splash of rain on the blurred glass Seemed that it briefly said, as I walked by, Something I should have liked to say to you, Something ... the dry grass bent under the pane Brimful of bouncing water ... something of A swaying clarity which blindly echoes This lonely afternoon of memories And missed desires, while the wintry rain (Unspeakable, the distance in the mind!) Runs on the standing windows and away.