1630 Nature poems

The palm tree exposes a large number of loose, carved spines out of pleasure? Boredom?

I The ground dove stuttered for a few steps then flew up from his path to settle in the sun-browned branches that were now barely twigs; in drought it coos with its relentless valve, a tiring sound, not like the sweet exchanges of turtles in the Song of Solomon, or the flutes of Venus in frescoes though all the mounds in the dove-calling drought the hills and gulches all briary and ochre and the small dervishes that swivelled in the dust were like an umber study for a fresco of The Prodigal Son, this scorched, barren acre. He had the smell of cities in his clothes, the steam and soot of trains of Fascist stations and their resounding vaults, he had the memory of rain carried in his head, the rain on Pescara's beach with the pastel hotels, and instead of the doves the air-show with the jets soaring and swooping over the Fair, the smell off that beach came back on the rock-road where the turtle lifted its mating music into the dry acacias, and mixed with the smell off the galloping sea-flock, each odour distinct, of sheep trampling their pens as if their fear had caught the wolf-scent. The rock-brown dove had fluttered from that fear that what he loved and knew once as a boy would panic and forget him from the change of character that the grunting swine could smell. A sow and her litter. Acknowledged prodigal. Grey sunrise through a sky of frosted glass, the great trees sodden, the paths below them pooled, the headlands veiled and muslin-thin, no birds, and pale green combers cresting through the drizzle; a change of climate, the clouding of the self in a sudden culture but one more confident in its glazed equestrian statues in wet parks, its railway stations echoing like the combers in the ground-shaken caves under the cliff; gathering, cresting then dissolving shallows as light steps quietly into the house. Light that inaudibly fits in the house as a book on a bookshelf with its spines of tombs and names, mouths slightly parted, eager to speak wherever their station now. Every library is a cemetery in sunlight. Sometimes, a shaft . . . Across the dry hillock, leaves chasing dead leaves in resurrecting gusts, or in the ochre quiet leaves too many to rake on the road's margins, too loaded to lift themselves, they lapsed singly or in a yellow chute from the cedar, burnt branches; lyres of desiccation choked the dry gutters everywhere in the country, La Feuillée, Monchy, by the caked track to Saltibus, over D'ennery. Drought. Song of the wireless harp of the frangipani that still makes a tangled music out of silence. II Now to cherish the depredations of April even on the threshold of March, its sunlit eve— the gommier maudit unshouldering its leaves, barrow after loaded barrow, the leaves fading, yellow, burnt grass and the tigerish shadows on the hillside, and the azure a trowelled blue, and blue hill-smoke, parched shortcuts and rust, cattle anchored in shadows and groaning like winches, the didactic drought against the hot sea that teaches what? Thirst for the grace that springs in grooves of oblivious dust. A fine haze screens the headland, the drizzle drifts. Is every noun: breakwater, headland, haze, seen through a gauze of English, a bright scrim, a mesh in which light now defines the wires and not its natural language? Were your life and work simply a good translation? Would headland, haze and the spray-wracked breakwater pronounce their own names differently? And have I looked at life, in other words, through some inoperable cataract? "What language do you speak in your own country?" Every noun has its echo, a noun is a noise, as every stone in the expanding sunlight finds an exact translation in its shadow, and it may be that you were halved by language as definitively as the meridian of Greenwich or by Pope Alexander's line, but what makes this, if this is all it is, more than just bearable, in fact, exultation is the stone that is looked at, and the manchineels, bitter, poisonous yellow berries, treacherous apples that look like Eden's on the tree of knowledge when the first noun was picked and named and eaten and the shadow of knowledge defined every edge originating language and then difference, and subtlety, the snake and contradiction and the sudden Babel of the manchineel. III The blank page grows a visionary wood. A parallel section, no, in fact a whole province of far, of foreign, of self-translating leaves stands on the place where it has always stood the right-hand margin of the page loud, soft but voluble in their original language, an orchestrating lexicon, veined manuscripts going far back in time and deep in roots and echoing in the tunnel of the right ear with echoes: oak-echo, beech-echo, linden-echo, and beech and birds a half-ancestral forest whose metre was an ocean's and whose break, parting declared the white-lined conjugation of combers' centuries. This ocean, English and this forest weald, this clattering natterer "burn," this distance, mist, kept its high columns marching as my pen moves towards that gap of light that comes upon the bright salt arc of a bare unprinted beach or where the piper leaves a print, its claws, dim, imperceptible as an ancient rune— that is the landscape, that, the stand of forest made up of all these leaves and lines that still rasp with delight with rhyme and incantation pages of shade turning into translation. And my left hand another vegetation but not their opposite or their enemy, palms and wild fern and praising them, the sea, sea-almond, grape and vine and agave that the wind's finger folded carefully drawing its thumb to mark the dog-eared wave across the dry hill, leaves chasing leaves in a shiny, scurrying wind, and, in the brown quiet, leaves, unraked, tiling the road's margins, so loaded they don't lift, they lapse singly, yellow, or chute from the cedars. Lyres of desiccation in March's autumn, filling the dry gutters, everywhere in the country, La Feuillée, Monchy, except for the wireless harp of the frangipani that still makes its music out of extreme stillness. In my own botanic origins,frangere panem to break bread, flower-flour in its white lilies, except that in rare blossom I now remember the flower is pink. It doesn't matter. Since whatever hue it is, its wafer it serves that need, petal on the sky's open palate at early mass every morning but here most on this Sunday with its Lenten drought, the heart-coloured flowers then the caterpillars determinedly devour, on a Sunday when a sadness still eats at the parallel petals of my beaten heart, and the white pews of the sea, the waves coming in aisles, my longing for the communion of breakfast, the leafless, flower-less but crusted bark of the frangipani, frangere panem, the pain that I break and eat flower and flour, pain and pain, bright Easter coming, like the seas white communion. IV In the country of the ochre afternoon it is always still and hot, the dry leaves stirring infrequently sometimes with the rattling pods of what they call "women's tongues," in the afternoon country the far hills are very quiet and heat-hazed, but mostly in the middle of the country of the afternoon I see the brown heat of the skin of my first love, so still, so perfect, so unaltered, and I see how she walked with her sunburnt hands against the still sea-almonds, to a remembered cove, where she stood on the small dock— that was when I thought we were immortal and that love would be folded doves and folded oars and water lapping against eroding stone in the ochre country of the afternoon.

I The dialect of the scrub in the dry season withers the flow of English. Things burn for days without translation, with the heat of the scorched pastures and their skeletal cows. Every noun is a stump with its roots showing, and the creole language rushes like weeds until the entire island is overrun, then the rain begins to come in paragraphs and hazes this page, hazes the grey of islets, the grey of eyes, the rainstorm's wild-haired beauty. The first daybreak of rain, the crusted drought broken in half like bread, the quiet trumpet mouth of a rainbow and the wiry drizzle fighting decease, half the year blowing out to sea in hale, refreshing gusts, the withered lilies drink with grateful mouths, and the first blackbird of the new season announces itself on a bough the hummingbird is reglistened drilling the pierced hedges, my small shaft to your heart, my emerald arrow: A crowd crosses a bridge from Canaries to the Ponte Vecchio, from Piaille to Pescara, and a volley of blackbirds fans over Venice or the broken pier of Choiseul, and love is as wide as the span of my open palm for frontiers that read like one country, one map of affection that closes around my pen. I had forgotten the benediction of rain edged with sunlight, the prayers of dripping leaves and the cat testing the edge of the season with careful paw. And I have nothing more to write about than gratitude. For la mer, soleil-là, the bow of the arc-en-ciel and the archery of blackbirds from its radiant bow. The rest of the year is rain. II There was a beautiful rain this morning." "I was asleep." He stroked her forehead. She smiled at him, then laughed as she kept yawning. "It was lovely rain." But I thought of the dead I know. The sun shone through the rain and it was lovely. "I'm sure," she said. There were so many names the rain recited: Alan, Joseph and Claude and Charles and Roddy. The sunlight came through the rain and the drizzle shone as it had done before for everybody. For John and Inge, Devindra and Hamilton. "Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon," wrote Edward Thomas. Her eyes closed in my arms, but it was sleep. She was asleep again, while the bright rain moved from Massade to Monchy. Sometimes I stretch out, or you stretch out your hand, and we lock palms; our criss-crossed histories join and two maps fit. Bays, boundaries, rivers, roads, one country, one warm island. Is that noise rain on the hot roof, is it sweeping out to sea by the stones and shells of the almond cemetery? III The road is wet, the leaves wet, but the sun inching, and always the astonishment: in March? This blustery, this grey? The waves chopping and circling and ramming into one another like sheep in a maddened pen from a whiff of wolf, or white mares, bug-eyed from the lightning's whip, and, if they could, whinnying. But the light will win. The sun fought with the rain in the leaves and won; then the rain came back and it was finer out to sea. A drizzle blurred the promontories evenly and now the manchineels and acacias sparkled with the new rain and the cows' hides darkened as the horses dipped their heads and shook their manes, and over the horizon the faint arc of an almost imperceptible bow appeared then dimmed across the channel towards Martinique. This miracle was usual for the season. "The sun came out just for you," he said. And it was true. The light entered her forehead and blazoned her difference there. The pastures were beaded, roofs shone on the hills, a sloop was working its way against huge clouds as patches of sunlight widened with a new zeal towards detachment, towards simplicity. Who said that they were lying side by side, the cupped spoon of her torso in his own in the striped shadows of mid-afternoon? IV The doors are open, the house breathes and I feel a balm so heavy and a benediction so weightless that the past is just blue air and cobalt motion lanced with emerald and sail-flecks and the dove's continuous complaint about repletion, its swollen note of gratitude- all incantation is the monody of thanks to the sky's motionless or moving altars, even to the faint drone of that silver insect that is the morning plane over Martinique, while, take this for what you will, the frangipani that, for dry months, contorted, crucified in impotence or barrenness, endured, has come with pale pink petals and blades of olive leaves, parable of my loin-longing, my silver age. From the salt brightness of my balcony I look across to the abandoned fort; no History left, just natural history, as a cloud's shadow subtilizes thought. On a sloped meadow lifted by the light, the Hessians spun like blossoms from the immortelle, the tattered pennons of the sea-almond fluttered to the spray-white detonations of the lilac against blue the hue of a grenadier, dried pods of the flamboyant rattle their sabres and a mare's whinny across the parched pastures launches white scuds of sails across the channel, the race of a schooner launched in a canal. A grey sky trawls its silver wires of rain; these are the subtleties of the noon sea: lime, emerald, lilac, cobalt, ultramarine.

Oh, yes, the rain is sorry. Unfemale, of course, the rain is with her painted face still plain and with such pixel you’d never see it in the pure freckling, the lacquer of her. The world is lighter with her recklessness, a handkerchief so wet it is clear. To you. My withered place, this frumpy home (nearer to the body than to evening) miserable beloved. I lie tender and devout with insomnia, perfect on the center pillow past midnight, sick with the thought of another year of waking, solved and happy, it has never been this way! Believe strangers who say the end is close for what could be closer? You are my stranger and see how we have closed. On both ends. Night wets me all night, blind, carried. And watermarks. The plough of the rough on the slick, love, a tendency toward fever. To break. To soil. Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die. It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would. I have loved the slaking of your forgetters, your indifferent hands on my loosening. Through a thousand panes of glass not all transparent, and the temperature. I felt that. What you say is not less than that.

They darken. In the sky over Florence, the oblong clouds swell and darken. And hailstones lift back through the updrafts, thickening, darkening, until, swollen as bird eggs, they drop to the cobbled streets. Horses! the child Galileo thinks, then peeks through the doorway to the shock of ten thousand icy hooves. At his back, his father is tuning violins, and because there is nothing sharper at hand Galileo saws through a captured hailstone with a length of E-string, the white globe opening slowly, and the pattern inside already bleeding its frail borders. Layers and layers of ice— Like what? Onion pulp? Cypress rings? If only the room were colder, and the eye finer. If only the hand were faster, and the blade sharper, and firmer, and without a hint of song . . .

Stay, I said to the cut flowers. They bowed their heads lower. Stay, I said to the spider, who fled. Stay, leaf. It reddened, embarrassed for me and itself. Stay, I said to my body. It sat as a dog does, obedient for a moment, soon starting to tremble. Stay, to the earth of riverine valley meadows, of fossiled escarpments, of limestone and sandstone. It looked back with a changing expression, in silence. Stay, I said to my loves. Each answered, Always.

Mid-October in Central Park, one of the elms has changed early, burning with a light grown accustomed to its own magnificence, imperceptible until this moment when it becomes more than itself, more than a ritual of self-immolation. I think of sacrifice as nourishment, the light feeding bark and veins and blood and skin, the tree better off for wanting nothing more. I used to imagine the chakra like this—a hole in the soul from the top of the head, where the light of knowing can shimmer through. In the summer of 1979 I saw that light shoot from my brother’s forehead as we sat chanting in a temple in Manila. He didn’t see it pulsing like a bulb in a storm, but he said he felt the warmth that wasn’t warmth but peace. And I, who have never been so privileged, since then have wondered if we believed everything because not to believe was to be unhappy. I’ve seen that light elsewhere —on a river in Bangkok, or pixeled across the shattered façades of Prague—but it is here where I perceive its keenest rarity, where I know it has passed over all the world, has given shape to cities, cast glamour over the eyes of the skeptic, so that it comes to me informed with the wonder of many beings. I can’t begin to say how infinite I feel, as though I were one of many a weightless absence touches, and out of this a strange transformation: the soul ringed with changes, as old as a tree, as old as light. I am always learning the same thing: there is no other way to live than this, still, and grateful, and full of longing.

Proud Maisie is in the wood, Walking so early; Sweet Robin sits on the bush, Singing so rarely. "Tell me, thou bonny bird, When shall I marry me?"— "When six braw gentlemen Kirkward shall carry ye." "Who makes the bridal bed, Birdie, say truly?"— "The gray-headed sexton That delves the grave duly. "The glowworm o'er grave and stone Shall light thee steady; The owl from the steeple sing, 'Welcome, proud lady.'"

Where the old trees reign with their forward dark light stares through a hole in the body’s long house. The bed rolls away from the body, and the body is forced to find a chair. At some hour the body sequesters itself in a shuttered room with no clock. When a clean sheet of paper floats by, the head inclines on its axis. It is one of those common bodies that felt it could not exist without loving, but has in fact gone on and on without love. Like a cave that has stopped growing, we don’t call it dead, but dormant. Now the body is on all fours, one arm engaged in pulling hair from a trap, an activity the body loathes. When the time comes, the body feeds on marinated meats and fruits trained to be luscious. Once the body had ambitions—to be tall and remain soft. No more, but it enjoys rappelling to the water. Because the body’s dwelling is stone, perched over water, we say the body is privileged. Akin to characters in Lawrence books, its livelihood is obscured. It owns a horse named Campaign it mounts on foggy morns. That was the body’s first lie. It has no horse and wouldn’t climb on one. Because the body lives so far from others, it likes reading about checkered lives on the metrópoli. It likes moving around at night under its dress. When it travels, bottles of lotion open in its bags. Early in March the big rains came—washing all good thoughts from the body’s cracks and chinks. By now the body admits it is getting on, and yet, continues to be tormented by things being the way they are. Recently the body took one of the old trees for a wife, but the union has broken down. The light has bored out of the body’s long house. Fog envelops its stone flanks. Still the body enjoys rappelling to the water. And it likes the twenty four-hour stores, walking up and down the aisles, not putting a thing in its basket.

Oh, greenly and fair in the lands of the sun, The vines of the gourd and the rich melon run, And the rock and the tree and the cottage enfold, With broad leaves all greenness and blossoms all gold, Like that which o'er Nineveh's prophet once grew, While he waited to know that his warning was true, And longed for the storm-cloud, and listened in vain For the rush of the whirlwind and red fire-rain. On the banks of the Xenil the dark Spanish maiden Comes up with the fruit of the tangled vine laden; And the Creole of Cuba laughs out to behold Through orange-leaves shining the broad spheres of gold; Yet with dearer delight from his home in the North, On the fields of his harvest the Yankee looks forth, Where crook-necks are coiling and yellow fruit shines, And the sun of September melts down on his vines. Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West, From North and from South come the pilgrim and guest, When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board The old broken links of affection restored, When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more, And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before, What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye? What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie? Oh, fruit loved of boyhood! the old days recalling, When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling! When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin, Glaring out through the dark with a candle within! When we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune, Our chair a broad pumpkin,—our lantern the moon, Telling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam, In a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team! Then thanks for thy present! none sweeter or better E'er smoked from an oven or circled a platter! Fairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine, Brighter eyes never watched o'er its baking, than thine! And the prayer, which my mouth is too full to express, Swells my heart that thy shadow may never be less, That the days of thy lot may be lengthened below, And the fame of thy worth like a pumpkin-vine grow, And thy life be as sweet, and its last sunset sky Golden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin pie!