1630 Nature poems

Since you were not Hume’s sunrise I watch the late-May moonrise alone and a nicotine trance assures me that summer is coming, and the arrival of painted toenails; that at last I truly understand aubades and James Stewart’s vacant hospital gaze after his wits have vanished with his love; that the transmigration of bruises from skin to spirit brings about such splendid depths of character you’ll drop a dime and never hear a sound. Clouds race across the moon’s pale face. I have character to spare, it is no comfort; I will write us down, making nothing happen, it won’t repair this ache of failed induction, these eye that live for sunlight, though the sky stays dark.

A shadow on the wall boughs stirred by the noonday wind that’s enough earth and for the eye enough celestial participation. How much further do you want to go? Refuse the bossy insistence of new impressions— lie there still, behold your own fields, your estate, dwelling especially on the poppies, unforgettable because they transported the summer— where did it go?

Shall earth no more inspire thee, Thou lonely dreamer now? Since passion may not fire thee Shall Nature cease to bow? Thy mind is ever moving In regions dark to thee; Recall its useless roving— Come back and dwell with me. I know my mountain breezes Enchant and soothe thee still— I know my sunshine pleases Despite thy wayward will. When day with evening blending Sinks from the summer sky, I’ve seen thy spirit bending In fond idolatry. I’ve watched thee every hour; I know my mighty sway, I know my magic power To drive thy griefs away. Few hearts to mortals given On earth so wildly pine; Yet none would ask a heaven More like this earth than thine. Then let my winds caress thee; Thy comrade let me be— Since nought beside can bless thee, Return and dwell with me.

She goes, she is, she wakes the waters primed in their wave-form, a flux of urge struck into oneness, the solid surge seeking completion, and strikes and shatters and is its fragments, distinction’s daughters and now, unholding, the cleave and merge the hew and fusing, plundering the verge and substance is the scheme it scatters and what it numbers in substantial sun. Her hands hold many or her hands hold none. And diving the salt will kiss a convex eye and be salt fact and be the bodied sky and that gray weight is both or beggared one, a dead dimensional, or blue begun.

I. She Had Some Horses She had some horses. She had horses who were bodies of sand. She had horses who were maps drawn of blood. She had horses who were skins of ocean water. She had horses who were the blue air of sky. She had horses who were fur and teeth. She had horses who were clay and would break. She had horses who were splintered red cliff. She had some horses. She had horses with eyes of trains. She had horses with full, brown thighs. She had horses who laughed too much. She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses. She had horses who licked razor blades. She had some horses. She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms. She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars. She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon. She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making. She had some horses. She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs. She had horses who cried in their beer. She had horses who spit at male queens who made them afraid of themselves. She had horses who said they weren't afraid. She had horses who lied. She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped bare of their tongues. She had some horses. She had horses who called themselves, "horse." She had horses who called themselves, "spirit," and kept their voices secret and to themselves. She had horses who had no names. She had horses who had books of names. She had some horses. She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak. She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts. She had horses who waited for destruction. She had horses who waited for resurrection. She had some horses. She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour. She had horses who thought their high price had saved them. She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her bed at night and prayed. She had some horses. She had some horses she loved. She had some horses she hated. These were the same horses. II. Two Horses I thought the sun breaking through Sangre de Cristo Mountains was enough, and that wild musky scents on my body after long nights of dreaming could unfold me to myself. I thought my dance alone through worlds of odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew would sustain me. I mean I did learn to move after all and how to recognize voices other than the most familiar. But you must have grown out of a thousand years dreaming just like I could never imagine you. You must have broke open from another sky to here, because now I see you as a part of the millions of other universes that I thought could never occur in this breathing. And I know you as myself, traveling. In your eyes alone are many colonies of stars and other circling planet motion. And then your fingers, the sweet smell of hair, and your soft, tight belly. My heart is taken by you and these mornings since I am a horse running towards a cracked sky where there are countless dawns breaking simultaneously. There are two moons on the horizon and for you I have broken loose. III. Drowning Horses She says she is going to kill herself. I am a thousand miles away. Listening. To her voice in an ocean of telephone sound. Grey sky and nearly sundown; I don't ask her how. I am already familiar with the weapons: a restaurant that wouldn't serve her, the thinnest laughter, another drink. And even if I weren't closer to the cliff edge of the talking wire, I would still be another mirror, another running horse. Her escape is my own. I tell her, yes. Yes. We ride out for breath over the distance. Night air approaches, the galloping other-life. No sound. No sound. IV. Ice Horses These are the ones who escape after the last hurt is turned inward; they are the most dangerous ones. These are the hottest ones, but so cold that your tongue sticks to them and is torn apart because it is frozen to the motion of hooves. These are the ones who cut your thighs, whose blood you must have seen on the gloves of the doctor's rubber hands. They are the horses who moaned like oceans, and one of them a young woman screamed aloud; she was the only one. These are the ones who have found you. These are the ones who pranced on your belly. They chased deer out of your womb. These are the ice horses, horses who entered through your head, and then your heart, your beaten heart. These are the ones who loved you. They are the horses who have held you so close that you have become a part of them, an ice horse galloping into fire. V. Explosion The highway near Okemah, Oklahoma exploded They are reasons for everything Maybe             there is a new people, coming forth being born from the center of the earth, like us, but another tribe. Maybe             they will be another color that no one has ever seen before. Then they might be hated, and live in Muskogee on the side of the tracks that Indians live on. (And they will be the ones to save us.) Maybe             there are lizards coming out of rivers of lava from the core of this planet, coming to bring rain to dance for the corn, to set fields of tongues slapping at the dark earth, a kind of a dance. But maybe the explosion was horses, bursting out of the crazy earth near Okemah. They were a violent birth, flew from the ground into trees to wait for evening night mares to come after them: then                 into the dank wet fields of Oklahoma then                 their birth cords tied into the molten heart then                 they travel north and south, east and west then                 into wet while sheets at midnight when everyone sleeps and the baby dreams of swimming in the bottom of the muggy river. then                 into frogs who have come out of the earth to see for rain then                 a Creek woman who dances shaking the seeds in her bones then                 South Dakota, Mexico, Japan, and Manila then                 into Miami to sweep away the knived faces of hatred Some will not see them. But some will see the horses with their hearts of sleeping volcanoes and will be rocked awake past their bodies to see who they have become.

Her voice is a roundness. On full moon days, she talks about renouncing meat but the butcher has his routine. And blood. M’s wisdom. Still reliable. There are sounds we cannot hear but understand in motion. Slicing of air with hips. Crushing grass, saying these are my feet. I want my feet in my shadow. Suffice to meet desires halfway. Quiet. We say her chakras are in place. When the thermos shatters, she knows the direction of its spill. She knows how to lead and follow. Know her from this. Sounds we cannot hear. The wind blows and we say it is cool. Night slips under the door. We are tucked into bed and kissed a fleeting one. Through the curtains, her voice loosens like thread from an old blanket, row upon row. We watch her teeth in the dark and read her words. She speaks in perfect order, facing where the breeze can tug it towards canals stretching for sound. Her faith abides by the cycle of the moon. See how perfect she is.

In the field — shepherd’s purse: to be seen even in the dark. Think on it — after the gravel paths, after the roads — uneven and achingly long, across the cold promise the border makes to a sloping field, to a ditch. A ditch like any other. A ditch I have known — since. Imagine them: green, slender, from crown to root, a rosette of radical leaves, smooth, arrow-shaped and above them numerous small, white, inconspicuous flowers. There was no need to ask the man to kneel but he did, as if he were going to beg forgiveness, which he did not, nor did he ask for his life. He named his children and his wife, murmured to his own private God. Overhead, there was the sound of pine shifting, the moon winnowing in the distance. So, nothing terrible about the night then, if you do not count the earth tilting, or the sound in the undergrowth of a passage from this world to the next. More than that I remember the flat-seed pouch: weed some call it, as if to flourish and seed in the poorest soil is to be just that. They are everywhere now — it seems to me, populating my field of vision like a generative disease, an affliction. Look: a man walks into a field. A field with shepherd’s purse. He falls. He falls again. Every day, from this day until kingdom come, he falls into the embrace of a field of flowers, into shepherd’s purse.

There were bees about. From the start I thought The day was apt to hurt. There is a high Hill of sand behind the sea and the kids Were dropping from the top of it like schools Of fish over falls, cracking skulls on skulls. I knew the holiday was hot. I saw The August sun teeming in the bodies Logged along the beach and felt the yearning In the brightly covered parts turning each To each. For lunch I bit the olive meat: A yellow jacket stung me on the tongue. I knelt to spoon and suck the healing sea ... A little girl was digging up canals With her toes, her arm hanging in a cast As white as the belly of a dead fish Whose dead eye looked at her with me, as she Opened her grotesque system to the sea ... I walked away; now quietly I heard A child moaning from a low mound of sand, Abandoned by his friend. The child was tricked, Trapped upon his knees in a shallow pit. (The older ones will say you can get out.) I dug him up. His legs would not unbend. I lifted him and held him in my arms As he wept. Oh I was gnarled as a witch Or warlock by his naked weight, was slowed In the sand to a thief’s gait. When his strength Flowed, he ran, and I rested by the sea ... A girl was there. I saw her drop her hair, Let it fall from the doffed cap to her breasts Tanned and swollen over wine red woolen. A boy, his body blackened by the sun, Rose out of the sand stripping down his limbs With graceful hands. He took his gear and walked Toward the girl in the brown hair and wine And then past me; he brushed her with the soft, Brilliant monster he lugged into the sea ... By this tide I raised a small cairn of stone Light and smooth and clean, and cast the shadow Of a stick in a perfect line along The sand. My own shadow followed then, until I felt the cold swirling at the groin.

I went into the forest searching for fire inside pleading wood, but I can’t say for how long I was moored between worlds. I heard a magpie’s rumination, but I don’t know if its wings lifted the moon or let it drift slow as a little straw boat set ablaze on a winding river. I learned the yellow-eyed wolf is a dog & a man. A small boy with a star pinned to his sleeve was hiding among thorn bushes, or it was how the restless dark wounded the pale linden tree outside a Warsaw apartment. Night crawls under each stone quick as a cry held in the throat. All I remember is my left hand was holding your right breast when I forced my eyes shut. Then I could hear something in the room, magnanimous but small, half outside & half inside, no more than a song— an insomniac’s one prophecy pressed against the curtains, forcing the ferns to bloom.

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble; His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves; The gale, it plies the saplings double, And thick on Severn snow the leaves. 'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger When Uricon the city stood: 'Tis the old wind in the old anger, But then it threshed another wood. Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman At yonder heaving hill would stare: The blood that warms an English yeoman, The thoughts that hurt him, they were there. There, like the wind through woods in riot, Through him the gale of life blew high; The tree of man was never quiet: Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I. The gale, it plies the saplings double, It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone: To-day the Roman and his trouble Are ashes under Uricon.