1630 Nature poems

1 The Saturday morning meadowlark came in from high up with her song gliding into tall grass still singing. How I'd like to glide around singing in the summer then to go south to where I already was and find fields full of meadowlarks in winter. But when walking my dog I want four legs to keep up with her as she thunders down the hill at top speed then belly flops into the deep pond. Lark or dog I crave the impossible. I'm just human. All too human. 2 I was nineteen and mentally infirm when I saw the prophet Isaiah. The hem of his robe was as wide as the horizon and his trunk and face were thousands of feet up in the air. Maybe he appeared because I had read him so much and opened too many ancient doors. I was cooking my life in a cracked clay pot that was leaking. I had found secrets I didn't deserve to know. When the battle for the mind is finally over it's late June, green and raining. 3 A violent windstorm the night before the solstice. The house creaked and yawned. I thought the morning might bring a bald earth, bald as a man's bald head but not shiny. But dawn was fine with a few downed trees, the yellow rosebush splendidly intact. The grass was all there dotted with Black Angus cattle. The grass is indestructible except to fire but now it's too green to burn. What did the cattle do in this storm? They stood with their butts toward the wind, erect Buddhists waiting for nothing in particular. I was in bed cringing at gusts, imagining the contents of earth all blowing north and piled up where the wind stopped, the pile sky-high. No one can climb it. A gopher comes out of a hole as if nothing happened. 4 The sun should be a couple of million miles closer today. It wouldn't hurt anything and anyway this cold rainy June is hard on me and the nesting birds. My own nest is stupidly uncomfortable, the chair of many years. The old windows don't keep the weather out, the wet wind whipping my hair. A very old robin drops dead on the lawn, a first for me. Millions of birds die but we never see it—they like privacy in this holy, fatal moment or so I think. We can't tell each other when we die. Others must carry the message to and fro. "He's gone," they'll say. While writing an average poem destined to disappear among the millions of poems written now by mortally average poets. 5 Solstice at the cabin deep in the forest. The full moon shines in the river, there are pale green northern lights. A huge thunderstorm comes slowly from the west. Lightning strikes a nearby tamarack bursting into flame. I go into the cabin feeling unworthy. At dawn the tree is still smoldering in this place the gods touched earth.

What's the bird ratio overhead? Zero: zero. Maybe it's El Niño? The storm, was it bad? Here the worst ever. Every tree hurt. Do you love trees? Only the gingko, the fir, the birch. Yours? Do you name your trees? Who owns the trees? Who's talking You presume a dialogue. Me and You. Yes. Your fingers tap. I'm listening. Will you answer? Why mention trees? When the weather turned rain into ice, the leaves failed. So what? Every year leaves fail. The cycle. Birth to death. In the night the sound of cannon, and death everywhere. What did you see? Next morning, roots against the glass. Who's talking now and in familiar language? Get real. What's real is the broken crown. The trunk shattered. Was that storm worse than others? Yes and no. The wind's torque twisted open the tree's tibia. Fool. You're talking about vegetables. Do you love the patio tomato? The Christmas cactus? Yes. And the magnolia on the roof, the felled crabapple, the topless spruce.

How many times should I look at you and should I change my life? Monarch you make your orange assent to death. And how much dexterity can you really teach me? Does your courage even map onto these worldly obligations to friends, my job, desire for a little affection in the late hours of the evening, etc.? I can't put myself ever in your head. But I can lie on your wing, with my left eye letting my right dart forward as you do. Don't ask something with a lifespan how to change your life. Ask something you can't believe ever lived.

Somewhere between here and Belen, the Rio Grande will narrow to a muddy bead, no more than three feet across from shore to shore. My friend, Nick Markulis, claims he loves the river's color there, and will bathe his toes in the water, and will go on and on about a dry river in Athens that measures its life in olive groves. Stratis Thalassinos told me about these peculiar waters that disappear and turn up again, and, of course, you know of Arethusa's fountain in Syracuse. I do not accuse Markopoulos (do I have the name right?—Markopoulos, Markulis, fugitive names, fugitive lives docking in Halifax) of being too conversant with asphodel meadows, but one cannot remain composed when hunters and cultic figures press their claims upon a sainted afternoon. Think now of the intimate authority of La Candelaria, the Sunday morning concert, the walk through the abandoned streets, where all was an occasion of Bogotá, a memory of Mazatlán, a shaping necessity we might have met at Salamis. Who can be sure that this white cloth will be dissolved by death?

When the fog burns off and the air's pulverized diamonds and you can see beyond the islands of forever!—far too dramatic for me. It hurts something behind my eyes near the sphenoid, not good. I prefer fog with fog behind it, uninflammable fog. Then there's no competition for brightness, no Byron for your Shelley, no Juno eclisping your Athena, no big bridge statement about bringing unity to landmasses. All the thought balloons are blank. The marching band can't practice, even a bird's got to get within five feet before it can start an argument. Like dead flies on the sill of an abandoned nursery, we too are seeds in the rattle of mortality. A foglike baby god picks it up, shakes it, laughs insanely then goes back to playing with her feet. I have felt awful cold and lonely and fog has been blotting paper to my tears. My dog is fog and I don't have to scoop its poop with my hand in a plastic bag. There are sensations that begin in the world, the mind responding with ideas but then those ideas cause other sensations. What a mess. We stand at the edge of a drop that doesn't answer back, fog our only friend although it's hell on shrimpboats. There, there, says the fog. Where, where? You can't see a thing.

Observe the cautious toadstools still on the lawn today though they grow over-evening; sun shrinks them away. Pale and proper and rootless, they righteously extort their living from the living. I have been their sort. See by our blocked foundation the cold, archaic clay, stiff and clinging and sterile as children mold at play or as the Lord God fashioned before He breathed it breath. The earth we dig and carry for flowers, is strong in death. Woman, we are the rich soil, friable and humble, where all our murders rot, where our old deaths crumble and fortify my reach far from you, wide and free, though I have set my root in you and am your tree.

rain on the lake room at the lodge alone in a room in the lazy light loons on the lake geese in the air moose in the woods aware    awake a cry dislodged from the musty woods the gamy musk of the one aroused the roaming moose the rooms lit up the woods awake in the loony light the moon dislodged the lake aflame the Muse amazed amused     aroused

What voice is this, thou evening gale! That mingles with thy rising wail; And, as it passes, sadly seems The faint return of youthful dreams? Though now its strain is wild and drear, Blithe was it once as sky-lark’s cheer — Sweet as the night-bird’s sweetest song, — Dear as the lisp of infant’s tongue. It was the voice, at whose sweet flow The heart did beat, and cheek did glow, And lip did smile, and eye did weep, And motioned love the measure keep. Oft be thy sound, soft gale of even, Thus to my wistful fancy given; And, as I list the swelling strain, The dead shall seem to live again!

My liveliest self, I give you fair leave in these windblown weathers, heather-hearted and human and strange, to turn every blackberry corner of yesterday’s summer. The robin, singing her love-me-forever, kiss-catch-clutch-in the heather blues, sings tide flow and autumn’s turning and white winds folding. Cattle along all hedges wind winter into their frosty breathing, their slow eyes dreaming barn, bullock, and fodder under all hedges. But sea cave and sycamore tell us the world is wider than weather. Blackberries darken the corners I turn, and gold seas turning darken, darken. My liveliest self, my other, Godspeed on our farings. The bronze path at evening.            Toward summer, then.                        My hand, your hand— as if first meeting.

(from Cymbeline ) Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, And Phoebus 'gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes: With every thing that pretty is, My lady sweet, arise: Arise, arise.