1630 Nature poems

IV. The Fireflies I have climbed blind the way down through the trees (How faint the phosphorescence of the stones) On nights when not a light showed on the bay And nothing marked the line of sky and sea— Only the beating of the heart defined A space of being in the faceless dark, The foot that found and won the path from blindness, The hand, outstretched, that touched on branch and bark. The soundless revolution of the stars Brings back the fireflies and each constellation, And we are here half-shielded from that height Whose star-points feed the white lactation, far Incandescence where the single star Is lost to sight. This is a waiting time. Those thirty, lived-out years were slow to rhyme With consonances unforeseen, and, gone, Were brief beneath the seasons and the sun. We wait now on the absence of our dead, Sharing the middle world of moving lights Where fireflies taking torches to the rose Hover at those clustered, half-lit porches, Eyelid on closed eyelid in their glow Flushed into flesh, then darkening as they go. The adagio of lights is gathering Across the sway and counter-lines as bay And sky, contrary in motion, swerve Against each other's patternings, while these Tiny, travelling fires gainsay them both, Trusting to neither empty space nor seas The burden of their weightless circlings. We, Knowing no more of death than other men Who make the last submission and return, Savour the good wine of a summer's night Fronting the islands and the harbour bar, Uncounted in the sum of our unknowings How sweet the fireflies’ span to those who live it, Equal, in their arrivals and their goings, With the order and the beauty of star on star.

After Ko Un In the village it’s the season of dried grass, the smell of   burned dirt, gaslight glinting through blackened stubble. I walk home across the rice-fields, brushing insects away from my face, remembering old Namdong who was buried yesterday. What does death ask of us? I must change whatever it was I was when the old man was alive. I keep looking at the rice-fields, glinting in the dark. Blasted by mildew, more withered than last year — how much work and love it must have taken. In autumn, no matter how bad the harvest, how big the debts — no thought of   leaving here, no thought of rest. As life goes on, time isn’t the largest thing to think of, it’s the smallest. Growing, going in drought or monsoon, mold or blight — what is the rice if  not alive? With Sunja Kim Kwock

Coming east we left the animals pelican beaver osprey muskrat and snake their hair and skin and feathers their eyes in the dark: red and green. Your finger drawing my mouth. Blessed are they who remember that what they now have they once longed for.

On the secret map the assassins Cloistered, the Moon River was marked Near the eighteen peaks and the city Of humiliation and defeat—wan ending Of the trail among dry, papery leaves Gray-brown quills like thoughts In the melodious but vast mass of today’s Writing through fields and swamps Marked, on the map, with little bunches of weeds. Certainly squirrels lived in the woods But devastation and dull sleep still Hung over the land, quelled The rioters turned out of sleep in the peace of prisons Singing on marble factory walls Deaf consolation of minor tunes that pack The air with heavy invisible rods Pent in some sand valley from Which only quiet walking ever instructs. The bird flew over and Sat—there was nothing else to do. Do not mistake its silence for pride or strength Or the waterfall for a harbor Full of light boats that is there Performing for thousands of people In clothes some with places to go Or games. Sometimes over the pillar Of square stones its impact Makes a light print. So going around cities To get to other places you found It all on paper but the land Was made of paper processed To look like ferns, mud or other Whose sea unrolled its magic Distances and then rolled them up Its secret was only a pocket After all but some corners are darker Than these moonless nights spent as on a raft In the seclusion of a melody heard As though through trees And you can never ignite their touch Long but there were homes Flung far out near the asperities Of a sharp, rocky pinnacle And other collective places Shadows of vineyards whose wine Tasted of the forest floor Fisheries and oyster beds Tides under the pole Seminaries of instruction, public Places for electric light And the major tax assessment area Wrinkled on the plan Of election to public office Sixty-two years old bath and breakfast The formal traffic, shadows To make it not worth joining After the ox had pulled away the cart. Your plan was to separate the enemy into two groups With the razor-edged mountains between. It worked well on paper But their camp had grown To be the mountains and the map Carefully peeled away and not torn Was the light, a tender but tough bark On everything. Fortunately the war was solved In another way by isolating the two sections Of the enemy’s navy so that the mainland Warded away the big floating ships. Light bounced off the ends Of the small gray waves to tell Them in the observatory About the great drama that was being won To turn off the machinery And quietly move among the rustic landscape Scooping snow off the mountains rinsing The coarser ones that love had Slowly risen in the night to overflow Wetting pillow and petal Determined to place the letter On the unassassinated president’s desk So that a stamp could reproduce all this In detail, down to the last autumn leaf And the affliction of June ride Slowly out into the sun-blackened landscape.

No one can draw fast enough To capture the cut Iris before its form falls From its former self. But when we passed a patch In the ditch, She told me to stop and she stepped Down, opening her clasp Knife. She spared one iris With an impressionistic Cocoon on its stem And cut the flower beside it. Once home She rendered in a careful hurry. She drew into the night as the iris died. I woke grafted to her In a vague, translucent hammock of dread.

(from her to ravish meaning ravine On the other side artifice slumbers in the green. The shadow follows hour by hour hollow and gloomy and which call me forth) ……………………………….grafted onto the sentence o a long time distant to hang on my belly obscure parallel images and tattoos age suggestive of the fingernail grazing the thigh the valley get turned on

A stupor on the heath, And wrath along the sky; Space everywhere; beneath A flat and treeless wold for us, and darkest noon on high. Sullen quiet below, But storm in upper air! A wind from long ago, In mouldy chambers of the cloud had ripped an arras there, And singed the triple gloom, And let through, in a flame, Crowned faces of old Rome: Regnant o’er Rome’s abandoned ground, processional they came. Uprisen as any sun Through vistas hollow grey, Aloft, and one by one, In brazen casques the Emperors loomed large, and sank away. In ovals of wan light Each warrior eye and mouth; A pageant brutal bright As if once over loudly passed Jove’s laughter in the south; And dimmer, these among, Some cameo’d head aloof, With ringlets heavy-hung, Like yellow stonecrop comely grown around a castle roof. An instant: gusts again, Then heaven’s impacted wall, The hot insistent rain, The thunder-shock; and of the Past mirage no more at all, No more the alien dream Pursuing, as we went, With glory’s cursèd gleam: Nor sin of Cæsar’s ruined line engulfed us, innocent. The vision great and dread Corroded; sole in view Was empty Egdon spread, Her crimson summer weeds ashake in tempest: but we knew What Tacitus had borne In that wrecked world we saw; And what, thine heart uptorn, My Juvenal! distraught with love of violated Law.

Stone worn Overgrown Pristine thorns Sheep shorn Tinkling below Roofless walls Rooks overlook I told you so Babbles the brook

She stood breast high amid the corn, Clasped by the golden light of morn, Like the sweetheart of the sun, Who many a glowing kiss had won. On her cheek an autumn flush, Deeply ripened;—such a blush In the midst of brown was born, Like red poppies grown with corn. Round her eyes her tresses fell, Which were blackest none could tell, But long lashes veiled a light, That had else been all too bright. And her hat, with shady brim, Made her tressy forehead dim;— Thus she stood amid the stooks, Praising God with sweetest looks:— Sure, I said, heaven did not mean, Where I reap thou shouldst but glean, Lay thy sheaf adown and come, Share my harvest and my home.

Most have been plowed up or paved over but you can still find them, tracks cut deep into the earth by prairie schooners crossing that great green ocean, pitching waves of pasture out where there's nothing else to do but live. Concealing their detritus— a piece of sun-bleached buffalo skull, a button from a cavalry soldier's coat—the ruts wind their way beneath leafy suburban streets, lie buried under a Phillips 66 and the corner of a Pizza Hut where a couple sits slumped in their booth. Yet here and there, like a fish head breaking the surface of the water, they emerge in a school teacher's back yard or a farmer's field, evidence of wagons packed with hardtack and hard money, thousands of draft animals tended by traders with blistered feet, their journey both bleak and romantic. That's the kind of proof I like, a scar I can put my hand to, history that will dust my fingers with a little bit of suffering, a little bit of bone.