1630 Nature poems

A snake is the love of a thumb and forefinger. Other times, an arm that has swallowed a bicep. The air behind this one is like a knot in a child’s shoelace come undone while you were blinking. It is bearing something away. What? What time does the next snake leave? This one’s tail is ravelling into its burrow— a rosary returned to a purse. The snake is the last time your spine could go anywhere alone.

Pruning back the old spirea bushes that sprawled for years in summer's heat, I bared the snake skin, a yard and a half long: its naked empty length rippled in the streaming wind lifting its ghostly coils from the dead shoots that scraped the slough from the slithering body that shed it in that narrow, shaded space. I paused—who wouldn't?—shears poised, slipped off gray canvas gloves, extracted the sere, striated casing from the brown stalks that had held it, silent, hidden. I coiled the paper-thin curling sheath with care, delicately, eased it into a simple squatty box for keeping, for care, for my daughters to take to school, to show, to explain how some sinuous body we've never glimpsed, that haunts about our shrubs, our porch, left for us this translucent, scale-scored wrapper, this silent hint of all that moves unseen.

The couple is traveling up the mountain. They have been traveling a long time to get to the mountain. They left early with their son who strums sweet songs with his fingers, songs his mother sang when she was young, singing sweetly like him for all that was yet to come. In the morning they saw snow on the mountain, waking as if to another country, far away from rain on the island of orchids where smoke is indistinguishable from mist, rain from stone. They wanted to get there before the snow melted, before it vanished like a memory. They left early, leaving the house they had built in the forest, the house that had aged with them, skin as dry as the logs they threw into evening fires. Before the son could talk, he walked among the trees, dreamed where roots lifted as if to let the earth breathe, resting to the sounds of his parents pulling, clearing, dragging, the sounds he later understood as what needs tending. The boy would climb the ladder to the loft, survey the trees and, peering through a curtain of leaves, proclaim himself ruler of all that he saw. His mother and father moved in and out of the mist, lumpy shadows lifting rocks, carrying water, planting heart-shaped flowers, speaking wordlessly to each other. The boy is alone in the back seat as they drive past the tin-roofed town, the market where under blue waves of tarp orchids spray out of buckets, bananas hang like tropical chandeliers, coffee beans slide down waxy pyramids and vendors fan at the jeweled flies, keeping fish on ice. His fingers pluck single notes, random at first and then combined as if his fingers could find a way to string his thoughts the way the road progressed past the last house, the last fern, the last tree sparkling fireworks of red blossoms. Pickup trucks hauling snow speed down the mountain, racing to unload the precious cargo for children who will run from TV sets to fall like angels in small fenced yards. The man is thinking about another woman as he climbs the slopes into clouds. It is all confusion — a whiteout he must negotiate, the puny engine unsuitable for the elevation, the dangerous road conditions. The woman is wondering how she will ever be able to leave him. The boy strums the guitar, strums and looks out the window. They break into sky, a blue unimaginable in the dome of the forest. The white glare hits their eyes like splintered glass. Clouds erupt in a thousand directions, tumbling below them like a cascade of white water. Observatories rise above the snow. At this hour, even though the gigantic lenses are shut, someone is watching the stars, predicting the trajectory of orbits spinning out of control.

Ghost sun half hidden, where did you go? There’s always a mother of some other creature born to fight for her young. But crawl out of your hide, walk upright like a man, & you may ask if hunger is the only passion as you again lose yourself in a white field’s point of view. In this glacial quiet nothing moves except— then a flash of eyes & nerves. If cornered in your head by cries from a cave in another season, you can’t forget in this landscape a pretty horse translates into a man holding a gun.

Timing’s everything. The vapor rises high in the sky, tossing to and fro, then freezes, suddenly, and crystalizes into a perfect flake of miraculous snow. For countless miles, drifting east above the world, whirling about in a swirling free- for-all, appearing aimless, just like love, but sensing, seeking out, its destiny. Falling to where the two young skaters stand, hand in hand, then flips and dips and whips itself about to ever-so-gently land, a miracle, across her unkissed lips: as he blocks the wind raging from the south, leaning forward to kiss her lovely mouth.

for Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown 1. RETREAT The sailor dreamt of loss, but it was I who dreamt the sailor. I was landlocked, sea-poor. The sailor dreamt of a woman who stared at the sea, then tired of it, advertised her freedom. She said to her friend: I want all the fire one can have without being consumed by it. Clearly, I dreamt the woman too. I was surrounded by mountains suddenly green after a long winter, a chosen uprootedness, soul shake-up, every day a lesson about the vastness between ecstasy and repose. I drank coffee called Black Forest at the local cafe. I took long walks and tried to love the earth and hate its desecrations. All the Golden Retrievers wore red bandannas on those muttless streets. All the birches, I think, were aspens. I do not often remember my dreams, or dream of dreamers in them. To be without some of the things you want, a wise man said, is an indispensable part of happiness. 2. MOUNTAIN, SKY I’ve been paying attention to the sky again. I’ve seen a ravine up there, and a narrow, black gorge. Not to worry, I tell myself, about tricks the mind plays, as long as you know they’re tricks. If the rich are casually cruel perhaps it’s because they can stare at the sky and never see an indictment in the shape of clouds. The frown, for example, in a thunderhead. The fist. That big mountain I’ve been looking at— I love how it borrows purple from the filtered light, sometimes red. Like any of us it’s all of its appearances. It’s good that the rich have to die, a peasant saying goes, otherwise they’d live forever. Here in this rented house, high up, I understand. I’m one of the rich for a while. The earth feels mine and the air I breathe is rarefied, if thin. Dusk now is making its last claim. I love the confluence of dark mountain, dark sky. Soon I won’t know the beginning from the end. 3. HIM Those empty celebrations of the half-believer along for the ride. Those secret words repeated in mirrors— someone’s personal fog. A man’s heart ransomed for comfort or a few extra bucks, his soul in rags. I have been him and him and him. Was it nobility or senility when my old grandmother tried to drown artificial flowers in the bathtub? Can only saints carry the load without talking about the burden? I want to lean into life, catch the faintest perfume. In every boy child an old man is dying. By middle age he begins to stink, complain. I want to have gifts for him when we finally meet. I want him to go out like an ancient Egyptian, surrounded by what is his, desiring nothing. 4. DELINEATION AT DUSK A lost hour, and that animal lassitude after a vanished afternoon. Outside: joggers, cyclists. Motion, the great purifier, is theirs. If this were Europe someone in a tower might be ringing a bell. People hearing it would know similar truths, might even know exactly who they are. It’s getting near drinking time. It’s getting near getting near; a person alone conjures rules or can liquefy, fall apart. That woman with the bouffant— chewing gum, waiting for the bus— someone thinks she’s beautiful. It’s beautiful someone does. The sky’s murmuring, the storm that calls you up, makes promises, never comes. Somewhere else, no doubt, a happy man slicing a tomato, a woman with a measuring cup. Somewhere else: the foreclosure of a feeling or a promise, followed by silence or shouts. Here, the slow dance of contingency, an afternoon connected to an evening by a slender wish. Sometimes absence makes the heart grow sluggish and desire only one person, or one thing. I am closing the curtains. I am helping the night. 5. SOLITUDE A few days ago I stopped looking at the photographs clustered on the wall, nudes, which had become dull to me, like a tourist’s collection of smooth rocks. I turned away from the view and conjured a plague of starlings. Oh how they darkened the landscape. Surely such beauty had been waiting for its elegy. I felt like crushing a rhododendron. Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body, the ventricles and the small bones in the hand, the intricacies of digestion .... When the radio said parents in California gave birth to another child so that their older child might have a bone-marrow transplant and live, I found myself weeping for such complicated beauty. How wonderful the radio and its distant, human voices. The rain now is quite without consequence coming down. I suppose I’ve come to the limits of my paltry resources, this hankering for people and for massive disturbance, then high pressure, the sequence that’s been promised for days. I will long to be alone when my friends arrive. 6. THE BODY WIDENS The body widens, and people are welcomed into it, many at a time. This must be what happens when we learn to be generous when we’re not in love, or otherwise charmed. I’ve been examining yesterday’s ashes. I’ve visited my own candleless altar. Little by little, the old selfish parts of me are loosening. I have a plan for becoming lean: to use all my fat in service of expansion. Have women always known this? Loveliness and fear when they open and let in and give away? The mountains here pierce the sky, and the sky, bountiful, closes in around them. 7. A NEW MOUTH Give me a new mouth; I want to talk. I’ve been watching the spider mend its web. I think I’ve learned something about architecture from a swallow. Excuse me while I separate the nettles from the flowers, while I put my nose to the black moist smell of earth and come up smiling. Somewhere in the world is the secret name for God, many-lettered, unpronounceable. There’s a speakable grace in the fields and even in the cities. The grapes ripen, someone refuses to become a machine. And yet I want to talk about the worn-out husks of men and women returning from the factories, the venereal streets, the bruise history passes down to its forlorn children. I need a new mouth to acknowledge that piety will keep us small, imprisoned, that it’s all right to be ridiculous and sway first to the left, then to the right, in order to find our balance. I’ve been watching an evening star quiver. I’ve been trying to identify the word before its utterance. Give me a new mouth and I’ll be a guardian against forgetfulness. I’ve noticed the wind doesn’t discriminate between sycamore and cypress. I want to find the cool, precise language for how passion gives rise to passion. 8. STRANGER The wind gone. I can hear my breathing. I can hear the lateness of the hour by what isn’t moving. Woodrun Slope. Snowmass Village. These are winter names, and it’s summer. The water from the mountains rushes down man-made gullies. Serious phantoms with their black tears are out tonight. I’m close—my other delusion goes— to the heart of things. A young man with a young man’s itch would rise and go out prowling. Tomorrow I’ll choose a mountain that’s a hill, take the slowest horse at the Lazy-7, slow and old, sure to know its trail. I knew a man who said he could dominate solitude. In other ways, too, he was a fool. Once I wanted to be one of those fabulous strangers who appear and disappear. Now I arrive only by invitation, stay long enough to earn my fare. Outside my window, clouds from the west erasing the stars. A coyote howling its singular news. At whatever pace, isn’t there an imperative to live? Before a person dies he should experience the double fire, of what he wants and shouldn’t have.

That marsh hawk, its blown-leaf flight across Tomales Bay fog, summer’s abraded light, the Pacific tide pressuring and squeezing wave on wave into the bay’s pinched inlet. . . We feel somehow between us still water crushed by that sea, so constant it seems not to be. The hawk, a circus, tumbles, stops, stands upon the air, beats its wings as if to shoo the sun’s drenched veils, and its clapping wings stop our unstoppable argument, that love goes, who knows why, and delivers us from pain to pain, air with teeth that seems to eat more air. Northern harrier, owl face, they sea-changed your name, who listens with your face and shows not love but want, speed, life in flight toward, forever toward, pausing at every chance to use what ocean-born bayside air sustains you by resisting you. We thank your sunken head bones and wild close-to-water seeking that somehow speaks to us, delivers us to another amazed agonized place.

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop over the fields, the telephone lines streaming behind, its billow of dust full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds. On either side, those dear old ladies, the loosening barns, their little windows dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs hide broken tractors under their skirts. So this is Nebraska. A Sunday afternoon; July. Driving along with your hand out squeezing the air, a meadowlark waiting on every post. Behind a shelterbelt of cedars, top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees, a pickup kicks its fenders off and settles back to read the clouds. You feel like that; you feel like letting your tires go flat, like letting the mice build a nest in your muffler, like being no more than a truck in the weeds, clucking with chickens or sticky with honey or holding a skinny old man in your lap while he watches the road, waiting for someone to wave to. You feel like waving. You feel like stopping the car and dancing around on the road. You wave instead and leave your hand out gliding larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

the man made me soften and melt said the old woman the bee made me shiver like a rag said the dark red tulip the bitch made me push said the dog

The softest word is leaf it zigzags in the air and falls on the yellow ground