1630 Nature poems

Think of the woman who first touched fire to a hollow stone filled with seal oil, how she fiddled with fuel and flame until blue shadows before and after her filled her house, crowded the underground, then fled like sky-captains chasing the aurora’s whale tale green beyond the earth’s curve. Her tenth summer, the elders let her raise her issum, seal pup orphaned when hunters brought in her mother, their grins of plenty broad, red. The women slit the hard belly. Plopped among the ruby innards steaming on rough-cut planks blinked a new sea-child whose first sound came out a question in the old language, a question that in one throaty bark asked who, meaning What family is this? What comfort do you provide for guests? Do you let strangers remain strangers? The women rinsed the slick pup in cool water, crafted a pouch for her to suck. Then the young girl whose hands held light even when the room did not brought this new being beside her bed, let it scatter babiche and split birch gathered for snowshoes, let it nose the caribou neck hairs bearding her dance fans. They held up the fans to their foreheads, playing white hair, playing old. In the time when women do not sew the seal danced at her first potlatch. And when the lamps burned down, no one could see any difference between waves in rock, waves in sea. The pup lifted her nose, licked salt from seven stars, and slipped light back among silvers and chum light among the ghostly belugas swimming far north to offer themselves.

What came wafting down the ditch by the marsh grass waving opened a hole in the day through which, like a puff of breath, a ghost fountained up rising in soft slo-mo, lost, desolate, no place left to go. Dear bloody Beirut and its internet cafes were still smoking from last night's "little bombing." Such threads, tattered sleeves blown all over the street from Emporio Armani. Husband and wife shot dead at the airport checkpoint. Where else would this lead? The investiture of grieving takes all day to sweep up in the tidal spillage of plate glass. What ish my nation, asked Captain MacMorris between battles. But the ditch knows just who we are— and I see its only water on a stealth raid of the glimmer hidden in the reeds. And when I come close, little scavenger flashings and great claws held out rigidly scuttle back into mud holes drilling the bank. Bending down to look, I could smell the corruption's gathering, sweetish odor, its sonar gone haywire driving it to shore. What choices are you given, what makes you want to swim out of your own element? The demure little ear-holes and intelligent clear eyes, the fate from birth sealed inside its smile, spent flukes and tail being gnawed to bone. The curt unrevealing stare mirroring back my own.

When is the smell of a blackberry tree a harbinger of  violent movement rather than simply the recollection of a childhood Sunday dress hem-dipped in mud, handprinted with juice and seeds? Hard to say. A mind, when playing tricks is at its most sincere — at home raking through the body’s history, repeating the strange and nostalgic. The taste of dirty copper, the imagined cockroach in the corner, the sluggish slow of  the clock — doctors call these strange little prophets warning signs of a seizure, synaptic misfires looming like a song discordant, until the body — an unplucked string — is finally strummed.

The antelope are strange people ... they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads. —Pretty Shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows transcribed and edited by Frank Linderman (1932) All night I am the doe, breathing his name in a frozen field, the small mist of the word drifting always before me. And again he has heard it and I have gone burning to meet him, the jacklight fills my eyes with blue fire; the heart in my chest explodes like a hot stone. Then slung like a sack in the back of his pickup, I wipe the death scum from my mouth, sit up laughing and shriek in my speeding grave. Safely shut in the garage, when he sharpens his knife and thinks to have me, like that, I come toward him, a lean gray witch through the bullets that enter and dissolve. I sit in his house drinking coffee till dawn and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps, crawling back into my shadowy body. All day, asleep in clean grasses, I dream of the one who could really wound me. Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look. Not even with his goodness. If a man was never to lie to me.Never lie me. I swear I would never leave him.

the froth of noise the undersides of the cedars make, the windblown dark that hints and fails for hours at effacement— maybe I could claim it isn’t praying, but it’s asking, at the least, begging that these lungfuls of this blackness eat whatever keeps on swelling and collapsing in my chest, and be done with it, no more noise left hanging in the spaces between brake lights than a smothered rush that sounds like suffering and is nothing. Instead a sobbing isn’t so much easing from my throat as shining like black light from my torso, veining the leaves of weeds, stoning the whole roadside in a halo—I can feel the heat of truck lights on my back, I’m inside that brilliant gravity, I think of time, I’m in the driver’s nightmare and it shudders by—

The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy, And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry, Rough, long grasses keep white with frost At the hilltop by the finger-post; The smoke of the traveller’s-joy is puffed Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft. I read the sign. Which way shall I go? A voice says: You would not have doubted so At twenty. Another voice gentle with scorn Says: At twenty you wished you had never been born. One hazel lost a leaf of gold From a tuft at the tip, when the first voice told The other he wished to know what ’twould be To be sixty by this same post. “You shall see,” He laughed—and I had to join his laughter— “You shall see; but either before or after, Whatever happens, it must befall, A mouthful of earth to remedy all Regrets and wishes shall freely be given; And if there be a flaw in that heaven ’Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be To be here or anywhere talking to me, No matter what the weather, on earth, At any age between death and birth, To see what day or night can be, The sun and the frost, the land and the sea, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring,— With a poor man of any sort, down to a king, Standing upright out in the air Wondering where he shall journey, O where?”

The cat has the chance to make the sunlight Beautiful, to stop it and turn it immediately Into black fur and motion, to take it As shifting branch and brown feather Into the back of the brain forever. The cardinal has flown the sun in red Through the oak forest to the lawn. The finch has caught it in yellow And taken it among the thorns. By the spider It has been bound tightly and tied In an eight-stringed knot. The sun has been intercepted in its one Basic state and changed to a million varieties Of green stick and tassel. It has been broken Into pieces by glass rings, by mist Over the river. Its heat Has been given the board fence for body, The desert rock for fact. On winter hills It has been laid down in white like a martyr. This afternoon we could spread gold scarves Clear across the field and say in truth, "Sun you are silk." Imagine the sun totally isolated, Its brightness shot in continuous streaks straight out Into the black, never arrested, Never once being made light. Someone should take note Of how the earth has saved the sun from oblivion.

I killed a great silver fish, cut him open with a long thin knife. The river carried his heart away. I took his dead eyes home. His red flesh sang to me on the fire I built in my backyard. His taste was the lost memory of my wildness. Behind amber clouds of cedar smoke, Orion drew his bow. A black moon rose from the night’s dark waters, a sliver of its bright face reflecting back into the universe.

Swallows carve lake wind, trailers lined up, fish tins. The fires of a thousand small camps spilled on a hillside. I pull leeks, morels from the soil, fry chubs from the lake in moonlight. I hear someone, hear the splash, groan of a waterpump, wipe my mouth. Fish grease spits at darkness. Once I nudged a canoe through that water, letting its paddle lift, drip. I was sucked down smaller than the sound of the dropping, looked out from where I had vanished.

Water spurts incredibly Clear up under simple feel And that is how We drank water A loon fled Into water Because a raven Could not dive Or swim. Only spinning is a star Dizziness       simple Ceremony appeasing weather With you sky, with for you sky Between A feeling a sky Heartfelt redolent in June Roses fume. May day Perpetual field of velvet horizon At a slant is the unicorn’s mane Realization from seed to flower We made contact chalices Filled, a sticky sweet Rim Oenone in layers tissue white Garb blooming staunchly Against salt caking waves Tosses the self Secret she has into the sea A volume into silence Liquid shadow engulfing liquid Ruin. Dumbess as condition Obsolete In generalization Sea flowers join Her hair. A music hummed In the mind otherwise mute In sedge hats we walk along pulling Iris and water oats for our vases Lysistrata’s cool Logical edge Lance leaved Golden Rod Linear leaves Untoothed edges Note the fringed beards And the relatively short Spurs on this deep yellow Orange species. Spur Shorter than that deeply Fringed lip. Sepals rounded And curved inward. Thickets Boys