1630 Nature poems

A mockingbird perched on the hood of a pay phone half-buried in a hedge of wild rose and heard it ring The clapper ball trilled between brass gongs for two seconds then wind and then again With head cocked the bird took note absorbed the ringing deep in its throat and frothed an ebullient song The leitmotif of bright alarm recurred in a run from hawk to meadowlark from May to early June The ringing spread from syrinx to syrinx from Kiowa to Comanche to Clark till someone finally picked up and heard a voice on the other end say Konza or Consez or Kansa which the French trappers heard as Kaw which is only the sound of a word for wind then only the sound of wind

A Colonial Custom Bathsheba came out to the sun, Out to our wallèd cherry-trees; The tears adown her cheek did run, Bathsheba standing in the sun, Telling the bees. My mother had that moment died; Unknowing, sped I to the trees, And plucked Bathsheba’s hand aside; Then caught the name that there she cried Telling the bees. Her look I never can forget, I that held sobbing to her knees; The cherry-boughs above us met; I think I see Bathsheba yet Telling the bees.

for Nathaniel, 1900—1968 All afternoon you worked at cutting them down. Branch after branch tossed into the heap. You had your ceremony. Old pants. The pipe. The pipe rested in the cleft of the tree. When the pile got big enough, you threw the kerosene. Now the woods are clouded again. You forgot the world could be this messy. Air thickens into leaves, the leaves into worms. Behind the barn, overnight, it seems, tents have spread out in the apple trees. There’s work for you. So you come back in your pants old as dirt. With a pipe heavy as stone. No time to lose. Whatever is rotten, whatever won’t hold the weight of another season, you hack down. There’s one moment, though, when you feel almost sorry for them. The tents break into flame and the small, black pieces of anguish crawl out into the grass. Those that get away, well, you let them get away this time.

Our high and mighty termite mound arises far above the ground, and just as deep, grows underground. Our nest is blessed to be immense.   It gives us all a firm defense, superior to any fence.   It shields us from our enemies.   It keeps us cooler, by degrees. From floods and droughts it guarantees.   A prize nobody will assign in architectural design, but still our hill suits us just fine.

Tsung Ping (375—443): "Now I am old and infirm. I fear I shall no more be able to roam among the beautiful mountains. Clarifying my mind, I meditate on the mountain trails and wander about only in dreams." -in The Spirit of the Brush, tr. by Shio Sakanishi, p. 34 for Kenneth Rexroth I always say I won't go back to the mountains I am too old and fat there are bugs mean mules And pancakes every morning of the world Mr. Edward Wyman (63) Steams along the trail ahead of us all Moaning, "My poor feet ache, my back Is tired and I've got a stiff prick" Uprooting alder shoots in the rain Then I'm alone in a glass house on a ridge Encircled by chiming mountains With one sun roaring through the house all day & the others crashing through the glass all night Conscious even while sleeping Morning fog in the southern gorge Gleaming foam restoring the old sea-level The lakes in two lights green soap and indigo The high cirque-lake black half-open eye Ptarmigan hunt for bugs in the snow Bear peers through the wall at noon Deer crowd up to see the lamp A mouse nearly drowns in the honey I see my bootprints mingle with deer-foot Bear-paw mule-shoe in the dusty path to the privy Much later I write down: "raging. Viking sunrise The gorgeous death of summer in the east!" (Influence of a Byronic landscape— Bent pages exhibiting depravity of style.) Outside the lookout I lay nude on the granite Mountain hot September sun but inside my head Calm dark night with all the other stars HERACLITUS: "The waking have one common world But the sleeping turn aside Each into a world of his own." I keep telling myself what I really like Are music, books, certain land and sea-scapes The way light falls across them, diffusion of Light through agate, light itself . . . I suppose I'm still afraid of the dark "Remember smart-guy there's something Bigger something smarter than you." Ireland's fear of unknown holies drives My father's voice (a country neither he Nor his great-grandfather ever saw) A sparkly tomb a plated grave A holy thumb beneath a wave Everything else they hauled across Atlantic Scattered and lost in the buffalo plains Among these trees and mountains From Duns Scotus to this page A thousand years (". . . a dog walking on this hind legs— not that he does it well but that he does it at all.") Virtually a blank except for the hypothesis That there is more to a man Than the contents of his jock-strap EMPEDOCLES: "At one time all the limbs Which are the body's portion are brought together By Love in blooming life's high season; at another Severed by cruel Strife, they wander each alone By the breakers of life's sea." Fire and pressure from the sun bear down Bear down centipede shadow of palm-frond A limestone lithograph—oysters and clams of stone Half a black rock bomb displaying brilliant crystals Fire and pressure Love and Strife bear down Brontosaurus, look away My sweat runs down the rock HERACLITUS: "The transformations of fire are, first of all, sea; and half of the sea is earth, half whirlwind. . . . It scatters and it gathers; it advances and retires." I move out of a sweaty pool (The sea!) And sit up higher on the rock Is anything burning? The sun itself! Dying Pooping out, exhausted Having produced brontosaurus, Heraclitus This rock, me, To no purpose I tell you anyway (as a kind of loving) . . . Flies & other insects come from miles around To listen I also address the rock, the heather, The alpine fir BUDDHA: "All the constituents of being are Transitory: Work out your salvation with diligence." (And everything, as one eminent disciple of that master Pointed out, had been tediously complex ever since.) There was a bird Lived in an egg And by ingenious chemistry Wrought molecules of albumen To beak and eye Gizzard and craw Feather and claw My grandmother said: "Look at them poor bed- raggled pigeons!" And the sign in McAlister Street: "IF YOU CAN'T COME IN SMILE AS YOU GO BY LOVE THE BUTCHER I destroy myself, the universe (an egg) And time—to get an answer: There are a smiler, a sleeper and a dancer We repeat the conversation in the glittering dark Floating beside the sleeper. The child remarks, "You knew it all the time." I: "I keep forgetting that the smiler is Sleeping; the sleeper, dancing." From Sauk Lookout two years before Some of the view was down the Skagit To Puget Sound: From above the lower ranges, Deep in the forest—lighthouses on clear nights. This year's rock is a spur from the main range Cuts the valley in two and is broken By the river; Ross Dam repairs the break, Makes trolley buses run Through the streets of dim Seattle far away. I'm surrounded by mountains here A circle of 108 beads, originally seeds of ficus religiosa Bo-Tree A circle, continuous, one odd bead Larger than the rest and bearing A tassel (hair-tuft) (the man who sat under the tree) In the center of the circle, a void, an empty figure containing All that's multiplied; Each bead a repetition, a world Of ignorance and sleep. Today is the day the goose gets cooked Day of liberation for the crumbling flower Knobcone pinecone in the flames Brandy in the sun Which, as I said, will disappear Anyway it'll be invisible soon Exchanging places with stars now in my head To be growing rice in China through the night. Magnetic storms across the solar plains Make Aurora Borealis shimmy bright Beyond the mountains to the north. Closing the lookout in the morning Thick ice on the shutters Coyote almost whistling on a nearby ridge The mountain is THERE (between two lakes) I brought back a piece of its rock Heavy dark-honey color With a seam of crystal, some of the quartz Stained by its matrix Practically indestructible A shift from opacity to brilliance (The Zenbos say, "Lightening-flash & flint-spark") Like the mountains where it was made What we see of the world is the mind's Invention and the mind Though stained by it, becoming Rivers, sun, mule-dung, flies— Can shift instantly A dirty bird in a square time Gone Gone REALLY gone Into the cool O MAMA! Like they say, "Four times up, Three times down." I'm still on the mountain.

Once I loved a spider When I was born a fly, A velvet-footed spider With a gown of rainbow-dye. She ate my wings and gloated. She bound me with a hair. She drove me to her parlor Above her winding stair. To educate young spiders She took me all apart. My ghost came back to haunt her. I saw her eat my heart.

Something blurred, warmed in the eye’s corner, like woodsmoke becoming tears; but when you turned to look the stoop was still, the pumpkin and tacky mum pot wouldn’t talk — just a rattle at the gutter and a sense of curtains, somewhere, pulled. Five of   them later, scarfing the oak’s black bole, laying a dream of snakes. Needy and reticent at once, these squirrels in charred November recall, in Virgil, what it is to feel: moods, half-moods, swarming, then darting loose; obscure hunches that refuse to speak, but still expect in some flash of   luck to be revealed. The less you try to notice them, the more they will know of  you.

Clouds thin into form: a hawk pulling a tail of rings—beads of an abacus, the mathematics of light—a lengthening spine, snakeskin no longer inhabited. All day I'm giving a name for what isn't there. Yet somewhere we've left our likeness, the hollow shapes of us. Even though the snake has slipped into the shade, the shed skin, deceptively whole, hidden in the sun-flecked grass, remembers what it once held.

Then all the nations of birds lifted together the huge net of the shadows of this earth in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, stitching and crossing it. They lifted up the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes, the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets, the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill— the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather, only this passage of phantasmal light that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever. And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew, what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries, bearing the net higher, covering this world like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes of a child fluttering to sleep; it was the light that you will see at evening on the side of a hill in yellow October, and no one hearing knew what change had brought into the raven's cawing, the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough such an immense, soundless, and high concern for the fields and cities where the birds belong, except it was their seasonal passing, Love, made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth, something brighter than pity for the wingless ones below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses, and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices above all change, betrayals of falling suns, and this season lasted one moment, like the pause between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace, but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

When first I walked here I hobbled along ties set too close together for a boy to step easily on each. I thought my stride one day would reach every other and from then on I would walk in time with the way toward that Lobachevskian haze up ahead where the two rails meet. Here we put down our pennies, dark, on shined steel; they trembled, fell still; then the locomotive out of Attleboro rattling its berserk wheel-rods into perfect circles, brightened them into wafers, the way a fork mashes into view the inner light of a carrot in a stew. In this late March sunshine, crossing the trees at the angle of a bow when it effleurages out of the chanterelle the C three octaves above middle C, the vertical birthwood remembers its ascent lines, shrunken by half, exactly back down, each tree on its fallen summer. Back then, these rocks often asked blood offerings—but this one, once, asked bone, the time Billy Wallace tripped and broke out his front teeth. Fitted with gold replicas, he asked, speaking more brightly, “What good are golden teeth, given what we’ve got to eat?” Nebuchadnezzar spent seven years down on all fours eating vetch and alfalfa, ruminating the mouth-feel of “bloom” and “wither,” until he was whole. If you held a grass blade between both thumbs and blew hard you could blurt a shriek out of it—like that beseeching leaves oaks didn’t drop last winter just now scratch on a breeze. Maybe Billy, lured by bones’ memory, comes back sometimes, too, to the Seekonk Woods, to stand in the past and just look at it. Here he might kneel, studying this clump of grass, as a god might inspect the strands of a human sneeze that percusses through. Or he might stray into the now untrafficked whistling-lanes of the mourning doves, who used to call and call into the future, and give a start, as though, this very minute, by awful coincidence, they reach it. And at last traipse off down the tracks, with arrhythmic gait, as wanderers must do once they realize: the over-the-unknown route, too, ends up where time wants. On this spot I skinned the muskrat. The musk breezed away. I buried the rat. Of the fur I made a hat, which as soon as put on began to rot off, causing my scalp to crawl. In circles, of course, keeping to the skull. One day could this scrap of damp skin crawl all the way off, and the whole organism follow? To do what? Effuse with musk, or rot with rat? When, a quarter- turn after the sun, the half-moon, too, goes down and we find ourselves in the night's night, then somewhere hereabouts in the dark must be death. Knowledge of it beforehand is surely among existence’s most spectacular feats—and yet right here, on this ordinary afternoon, in these woods, with a name meaning “black goose” in Wampanoag, or in modern Seekonkese, “slob blowing fat nose,” this unlikely event happens—a creature walking the tracks knows it will come. Then too long to touch every tie, his stride is now just too short to reach every other, and so he is to be still the wanderer, the hirtle of too much replaced by the common limp of too little. But he almost got there. Almost stepped in consonance with the liturgical, sleeping gods’ snores you can hear humming up from former times inside the ties. He almost set foot in that border zone where what follows blows back, shimmering everything, making walking like sleepwalking, railroad tracks a country lane on a spring morning, on which a man, limping but blissful, makes his way homeward, his lips, suppled by kissing to bunch up like that, blowing these short strands of hollowed-out air, haunted by future, into a tune on the tracks. I think I’m about to be shocked awake. As I was in childhood, when I battered myself back to my senses against a closed door, or woke up hanging out of an upstairs window. Somnambulism was my attempt to slip under cover of nightmare across no father’s land and embrace a phantasm. If only I had found a way to enter his hard time served at labor by day, by night in solitary, and put my arms around him in reality, I might not now be remaking him in memory still; anti-alchemizing bass kettle’s golden reverberations back down to hair, flesh, blood, bone, the base metals. I want to crawl face down in the fields and graze on the wild strawberries, my clothes stained pink, even for seven years if I must, if they exist. I want to lie out on my back under the thousand stars and think my way up among them, through them, and a little distance past them, and attain a moment of absolute ignorance, if I can, if human mentality lets us. I have always intended to live forever; but not until now, to live now. The moment I have done one or the other, I here swear, no one will have to drag me , I’ll come but never will I agree to burn my words. The poplar logs creosoted asleep under the tracks have stopped snoring. Maybe they’ve already waked up. The bow saws at G. An oak leaf rattles on its tree. The rails may never meet, O fellow Euclideans, for you, for me. So what if we groan. That’s our noise. Laughter is our stuttering in a language we can’t speak yet. Behind, the world made of wishes goes dark. Ahead, if not now then never, shines what is.