1630 Nature poems

Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

In the brown water, Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine, Liquid and cool in the shade of the reeds, A pike dozed. Lost among the shadows of stems He lay unnoticed. Suddenly he flicked his tail, And a green-and-copper brightness Ran under the water. Out from under the reeds Came the olive-green light, And orange flashed up Through the sun-thickened water. So the fish passed across the pool, Green and copper, A darkness and a gleam, And the blurred reflections of the willows on the opposite bank Received it.

We say pinhole. A pin hole of light. We can’t imagine how bright more of it could be, the way this much defeats night. It almost isn’t fair, whoever poked this, with such a small act to vanquish blackness.

From the beginning, the egg cradled in pebbles, The drive thick with fledglings, to the known last Riot of the senses, is only a short pass. Earth to be forked over is more patient, Bird hungers more, flower dies sooner. But if not grasped grows quickly, silently. We are restless, not remembering much. The pain is slow, original as laughter, Reaching for all of it, hardly aware, Beginning again and feeling for its terrain. We were often told and still we would not listen, And closing fingers, those accomplices, Took comfort from a lie. From lap to grass Whining, motionless on the lowest branch Above the pine needles, climbing the heather: We did not listen. It hid there still to find. Much since was hard to get, later displeased, Nursing an ordinary complaint or waiting For a reiterated brilliance, Growing in ignorance, too near to see. Now in the suburbs windows are on fire, Pale globes quiver on their dusty strings And afternoons disperse with mirth of gnome, The rigid stabbed flamingo pink in the trees, Split to the touch and walking by the pool. Now life jerking in its sustained coda Constricts its furniture and its events. The frowning bus disappears down the hill Or slides before the window with its bored Passengers staring unashamedly in. Now above the trees the ice-cream’s bare Electric tongue stammers its recitation. Children run out in the dumb-bell cul-de-sac To their cold delight, skipping between the turds Of long-dead dogs, coiled thickly on the stone. The children learn so quickly. The house stirs. Swallows leave earlier, apples to be pressed. Half the sky burns: the other half is dark. Hair pushing slowly out, generations Surrounding us with wonder, theirs and ours. Nothing to give, nothing has been learnt. The past simply denies the urge for a truce, Creeping into the egg. When it is time We can appoint a committee for the feasts, And for next year’s feasts, and the year after. Locks stick, glass metamorphosed In leafy caryatids of summer where Heat packs the panes and fingers tremble in Tobacco pockets, a tomato sniffed, Its greenish acid bloom and tiny hairs. The pain stirs again like a new life To be unravelled. It had to come to this. The body is nothing, the body thinks nothing, The short senses grubbing on their sticks Feel nothing, the forgotten carioca. A line moves to the finger end, and curls, Head fallen in helplessness. The wails Of children break behind the woven fences, Those minted faces tar beyond our sight. The gates shut: a parade of Japanese flags. And alive on the porch the councillor lowers his pipe, Comes down from the dunes a bathroom Arab Firing off caps, or crouched over shells Gathered in sodden pumps, the soprano waitress Bringing hot tea across the evening sand. The nights come in slowly. Behind a half-curtain The impossible is completed. A single lamp Weighs down its ornaments in pools of light. Shadows crawl over the crater, roped To the terrain’s recoil, roped to the pit.

One granite ridge A tree, would be enough Or even a rock, a small creek, A bark shred in a pool. Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted Tough trees crammed In thin stone fractures A huge moon on it all, is too much. The mind wanders. A million Summers, night air still and the rocks Warm.   Sky over endless mountains. All the junk that goes with being human Drops away, hard rock wavers Even the heavy present seems to fail This bubble of a heart. Words and books Like a small creek off a high ledge Gone in the dry air. A clear, attentive mind Has no meaning but that Which sees is truly seen. No one loves rock, yet we are here. Night chills. A flick In the moonlight Slips into Juniper shadow: Back there unseen Cold proud eyes Of Cougar or Coyote Watch me rise and go.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires.

Tree, we take leave of you; you’re on your own. Put down your taproot with its probing hairs that sluice the darkness and create unseen the tree that mirrors you below the ground. For when we plant a tree, two trees take root: the one that lifts its leaves into the air, and the inverted one that cleaves the soil to find the runnel’s sweet, dull silver trace and spreads not up but down, each drop a leaf in the eternal blackness of that sky. The leaves you show uncurl like tiny fists and bear small button blossoms, greenish white, that quicken you. Now put your roots down deep; draw light from shadow, break in on earth’s sleep.

I leave the formal garden of schedules where hours hedge me, clip the errant sprigs of thought, and day after day, a boxwood topiary hunt chases a green fox never caught. No voice calls me to order as I enter a dream of meadow, kneel to earth and, moving east to west, second the motion only of the sun. I plant frail seedlings in the unplowed field, trusting the wildness hidden in their hearts. Spring light sprawls across false indigo and hyssop, daisies, flax. Clouds form, dissolve, withhold or promise rain. In time, outside of time, the unkempt afternoons fill up with flowers.

tell the flowers—they think the sun loves them. The grass is under the same simple-minded impression about the rain, the fog, the dew. And when the wind blows, it feels so good they lose control of themselves and swobtoggle wildly around, bumping accidentally into their slender neighbors. Forgetful little lotus-eaters, solar-powered hydroholics, drawing nourishment up through stems into their thin green skin, high on the expensive chemistry of mitochondrial explosion, believing that the dirt loves them, the night, the stars— reaching down a little deeper with their pale albino roots, all Dizzy Gillespie with the utter sufficiency of everything. They don't imagine lawn mowers, the four stomachs of the cow, or human beings with boots who stop to marvel at their exsquisite flexibility and color. They persist in their soft-headed hallucination of happiness. But please don't mention it. Not yet. Tell me what would you possibly gain from being right?

The ants came to investigate the dead bull snake, nibbled at the viscera and hurried off with full mouths waving wild antenae. Moths alighted, beetles swarmed, flies buzzed in the stomach. Three crows tugged and tore and flew off to their oak tree with the skin. In every house men, women and children were chewing beef. Who was it said “The wonder of the world is its comprehensibility”?