1630 Nature poems

The nightingale, as soon as April bringeth Unto her rested sense a perfect waking, While late bare earth, proud of new clothing, springeth, Sings out her woes, a thorn her song-book making, And mournfully bewailing, Her throat in tunes expresseth What grief her breast oppresseth For Tereus’ force on her chaste will prevailing. O Philomela fair, O take some gladness, That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness: Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth; Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth. Alas, she hath no other cause of anguish But Tereus’ love, on her by strong hand wroken, Wherein she suffering, all her spirits languish; Full womanlike complains her will was broken. But I, who daily craving, Cannot have to content me, Have more cause to lament me, Since wanting is more woe than too much having. O Philomela fair, O take some gladness, That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness: Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth; Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.

Midmorning like a deserted room, apparition Of armoire and table weights, Oblongs of flat light, the rosy eyelids of lovers Raised in their ghostly insurrection, Decay in the compassed corners beating its black wings, Late June and the lilac just ajar. Where the deer trail sinks down through the shadows of blue spruce, Reeds rustle and bow their heads, Creek waters murmur on like the lamentation of women For faded, forgotten things. And always the black birds in the trees, Always the ancient chambers thudding inside the heart. _________ Swallow pure as a penknife slick through the insected air. Swallow poised on the housepost, beakful of mud and a short straw. Swallow dun-orange, swallow blue, mud purse and middle arch, Home sweet home. Swallow unceasing, swallow unstill At sundown, the mother's shade over silver water. At the edge of the forest, no sound in the grey stone, No moan from the blue lupin. The shadows of afternoon begin to gather their dark robes And unlid their crystal eyes. Minute by minute, step by slow step, Like the small hand on a clock, we climb north, toward midnight. _________ I've made a small hole in the silence, a tiny one, Just big enough for a word. And when I rise from the dead, whenever that is, I'll say it. I can't remember the word right now, But it will come back to me when the northwest wind blows down off Mt. Caribou The day that I rise from the dead, whenever that is. Sunlight, on one leg, limps out to the meadow and settles in. Insects fall back inside their voices, Little fanfares and muted repeats, Inadequate language of sorrow, inadequate language of silted joy, As ours is. The birds join in. The sunlight opens her other leg. _________ At times the world falls away from us with all its disguises, And we are left with ourselves As though we were dead, or otherwised, our lips still moving, The empty distance, the heart Like a votive little-red-wagon on top of a child's grave, Nothing touching, nothing close. A long afternoon, and a long rain begins to fall. In some other poem, angels emerge from their cold rooms, Their wings blackened by somebody's dream. The rain stops, the robin resumes his post. A whisper Out of the clouds and here comes the sun. A long afternoon, the robin flying from post back to post. _________ The length of vowel sounds, by nature and by position, Count out the morning's meters— bird song and squirrel bark, creek run, The housefly's languor and murmurous incantation. I put on my lavish robes And walk at random among the day's dactyls and anapests, A widening caesura with each step. I walk through my life as though I were a bookmark, a holder of place, An overnight interruption in somebody else's narrative. What is it that causes this? What is it that pulls my feet down, and keeps on keeping my eyes fixed to the ground? Whatever the answer, it will start the wolf pack down from the mountain, The raven down from the tree. _________ Time gnaws on our necks like a dog gnaws on a stew bone. It whittles us down with its white teeth, It sends us packing, leaving no footprints on the dust-dour road. That's one way of putting it. Time, like a golden coin, lies on our tongue's another. We slide it between our teeth on the black water, ready for what's next. The white eyelids of dead boys, like flushed birds, flutter up At the edge of the timber. Domestic lupin Crayolas the yard. Slow lopes of tall grasses Southbound in the meadow, hurled along by the wind. In wingbeats and increments, The disappeared come back to us, the soul returns to the tree. _________ The intermittent fugues of the creek, saying yes, saying no, Master music of sunlight And black-green darkness under the spruce and tamaracks, Lull us and take our breath away. Our lips form fine words, But nothing comes out. Our lips are the messengers, but nothing can come out. After a day of high winds, how beautiful is the stillness of dusk. Enormous silence of stones. Illusion, like an empty coffin, that something is missing. Monotonous psalm of underbrush and smudged flowers. After the twilight, darkness. After the darkness, darkness, and then what follows that. _________ The unborn own all of this, what little we leave them, St. Thomas's hand returning repeatedly to the wound, Their half-formed mouths irrepressible in their half-sleep, Asking for everything, and then some. Already the melancholy of their arrival Swells like a sunrise and daydream over the eastern ridge line. Inside the pyrite corridors of late afternoon, Image follows image, clouds Reveal themselves, and shadows, like angels, lie at the feet of all things. Chambers of the afterlife open deep in the woods, Their secret hieroglyphics suddenly readable With one eye closed, then with the other. _________ One star and a black voyage, drifting mists to wish on, Bullbats and their lullabye— Evening tightens like an elastic around the hills. Small sounds and the close of day, As if a corpse had risen from somewhere deep in the meadow And walked in its shadows quietly. The mouth inside me with its gold teeth Begins to open. No words appear on its lips, no syllables bubble along its tongue. Night mouth, silent mouth. Like drugged birds in the trees, angels with damp foreheads settle down. Wind rises, clouds arrive, another night without stars.

for JA I flutter in order to enter the phrase’s silver. Jackdaws have launched nearby this time, silk green and ripped, the movement a kind of chafing thinking. Oh he’s marking terrain right there— right there with his unmade song. The shadow kids whip fronds, froth air up into heat, pure and simple “violence of the eye.” Wild iris ink, wet in the margin’s stage. Well, hadn’t this testament begun to carry its chime in stripes? That’s when I knew he was going away from me, towards the sound. Like the ring on the table it can’t be decentered. Rim around the recent. Ashes, ashes, A bright tangled seeming.

It's midnight now and sounds like midnight then, The words like distant stars that faintly grace The all-pervading dark of space, But not meant for the world of men. It's not what we forget But what was never known we most regret Discovery of. Checking one last cassette Among my old unlabelled discards, few Of which reward the playing, I find you. Some years after her death, but years ago, Hearing Gwen's voice recite "Suburban Sonnet," At first we could not focus on it, So jolted that the radio Should casually exhume From our shared memory the woman whom We knew and make her present in the room, As though in flesh, surprised to find that she Had earned this further immortality. Who ever thought they would not hear the dead? Who ever thought that they could quarantine Those who are not, who once had been? At that old station on North Head Inmates still tread the boards, Or something does; equipment there records The voices in the dormitories and wards, Although it's years abandoned. Undeleted, What happened is embedded and repeated, Or so they say. And that would not faze you Who always claimed events could not escape Their scenes, recorded as on tape In matter and played back anew To anyone attuned To that stored energy, that psychic wound. You said you heard the presence which oppugned Your trespass on its lasting sole occasion In your lost house. I scarcely need persuasion, So simple is this case. Here in the dark I listen, tensing in distress, to each Uncertain fragment of your speech, Each desolate, half-drunk remark You uttered unaware That this cassette was running and would share Far in the useless future your despair With one who can do nothing but avow You spoke from midnight, and it's midnight now.

In such a night, when every louder wind Is to its distant cavern safe confined; And only gentle Zephyr fans his wings, And lonely Philomel, still waking, sings; Or from some tree, famed for the owl’s delight, She, hollowing clear, directs the wand’rer right: In such a night, when passing clouds give place, Or thinly veil the heav’ns’ mysterious face; When in some river, overhung with green, The waving moon and the trembling leaves are seen; When freshened grass now bears itself upright, And makes cool banks to pleasing rest invite, Whence springs the woodbind, and the bramble-rose, And where the sleepy cowslip sheltered grows; Whilst now a paler hue the foxglove takes, Yet checkers still with red the dusky brakes When scatter’d glow-worms, but in twilight fine, Shew trivial beauties, watch their hour to shine; Whilst Salisb’ry stands the test of every light, In perfect charms, and perfect virtue bright: When odors, which declined repelling day, Through temp’rate air uninterrupted stray; When darkened groves their softest shadows wear, And falling waters we distinctly hear; When through the gloom more venerable shows Some ancient fabric, awful in repose, While sunburnt hills their swarthy looks conceal, And swelling haycocks thicken up the vale: When the loosed horse now, as his pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing through th’ adjoining meads, Whose stealing pace, and lengthened shade we fear, Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear: When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food, And unmolested kine rechew the cud; When curlews cry beneath the village walls, And to her straggling brood the partridge calls; Their shortlived jubilee the creatures keep, Which but endures, whilst tyrant man does sleep; When a sedate content the spirit feels, And no fierce light disturbs, whilst it reveals; But silent musings urge the mind to seek Something, too high for syllables to speak; Till the free soul to a composedness charmed, Finding the elements of rage disarmed, O’er all below a solemn quiet grown, Joys in th’ inferior world, and thinks it like her own: In such a night let me abroad remain, Till morning breaks, and all’s confused again; Our cares, our toils, our clamors are renewed, Or pleasures, seldom reached, again pursued.

My itinerary is the eternity of exile. Deferred is the trip back into domicile. My marching orders lost at sea; my papers shrouded in an immigrant's secrecy. Lamar Avenue in Austin, Texas is wide, long and it flows. Air-conditioned apartments allow for repose. My transports and attachments to the past, my dream-life, have an urgency that is never lost. An exile's ultimate treat, tonight's dreamlike score: a dinner with the Zaidis in their Islamabad home.

That scraping of iron on iron when the wind rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t quit with, but drags back and forth. Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just beyond the screened door, as if someone there squats in the dark honing his wares against my threshold. Half steel wire, half metal wing, nothing and anything might make this noise of saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning of bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of rust, or ore abraded. Tonight, something bows that should not bend. Something stiffens that should slide. Something, loose and not right, rakes or forges itself all night.

Mother died last night, Mother who never dies. Winter was in the air, many months away but in the air nevertheless. It was the tenth of May. Hyacinth and apple blossom bloomed in the back garden. We could hear Maria singing songs from Czechoslovakia — How alone I am— songs of that kind. How alone I am, no mother, no father —

Where are you now, my poems, my sleepwalkers? No mumbles tonight? Where are you, thirst, fever, humming tedium? The sodium streetlights burr outside my window, steadfast, unreachable, little astonishments lighting the way uphill. Where are you now, when I need you most? It’s late. I’m old. Come soon, you feral cats among the dahlias.

Last night in bed I mouthed a prayer of my own composition. It sounded offhand, it was carelessly addressed, it twisted my meaning entirely, it left an ache, I didn’t know what I was doing. So I took down my yellowed copy of French With Pictures by the late literary critic I.A. Richards and I put my petition into soft French words. I.A. Richards believed that irony was the language of redemption. He wrote and lectured famously on this, but his masterpiece was French With Pictures. “The chapeau is on the table.” “The man with the beard stands before the window.” “She comes from a village by the sea.” There is no improving the old traditions. They are already mortal, partial, and wrong. The woman at the table by the window puts her head into her hands. “Into your hands,” she said.