1630 Nature poems

A man can give up so much, can limit himself to handwritten correspondence, to foods made of whole grains, to heat from a woodstove, logs hewn by his own hand and stacked neatly like corpses by the backdoor. He can play nocturnes by heart. They will not make the beloved appear. He can learn the names of all the birds in the valley. Not one will be enticed to learn his.

A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

As the immense dew of Florida Brings forth The big-finned palm And green vine angering for life, As the immense dew of Florida Brings forth hymn and hymn From the beholder, Beholding all these green sides And gold sides of green sides, And blessed mornings, Meet for the eye of the young alligator, And lightning colors So, in me, come flinging Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.

The glassy hill I clomb for thee For surefooted step, hooves behoove the haver. The sky redid blue, the woman wavered, and the black bull (the vanquisher), vanished. She called out to nothing, and in vain shed tears until she reached the glass hill’s impasse. Served her standard fairy tale penance,passim, served her seven to be given iron shoes to — at last — scale the hill, the earned neared end. Each step conquered territory, at last, the sleeping prince-once-bull, torrid tearing of clothes, tearing on one’s clothes, three nights of this until the prince awakes. How she, exhausted, must have felt in the at long last, the ever after. Happily, I guess, but a long time until laughter.

I returned to a long strand, the hammered curve of a bay, and found only the secular powers of the Atlantic thundering. I faced the unmagical invitations of Iceland, the pathetic colonies of Greenland, and suddenly those fabulous raiders, those lying in Orkney and Dublin measured against their long swords rusting, those in the solid belly of stone ships, those hacked and glinting in the gravel of thawed streams were ocean-deafened voices warning me, lifted again in violence and epiphany. The longship’s swimming tongue was buoyant with hindsight— it said Thor’s hammer swung to geography and trade, thick-witted couplings and revenges, the hatreds and behind-backs of the althing, lies and women, exhaustions nominated peace, memory incubating the spilled blood. It said, ‘Lie down in the word-hoard, burrow the coil and gleam of your furrowed brain. Compose in darkness. Expect aurora borealis in the long foray but no cascade of light. Keep your eye clear as the bleb of the icicle, trust the feel of what nubbed treasure your hands have known.’

Hoarfrost coats and cuffs the playing fields, a heyday of glistening. So there’s hope in my throat as I walk across them to the woods with my chest flung open, spilling its coins. The light so bright I can hear it, a silver tone like a penny whistle. It’s fall, so I’m craving pine cones. Hundreds of maples the color of bulldozers! But something strange is going on: the trees are tired of meaning, sick of providing mystery, parallels, consolation. “Leave us alone,” they seem to cry, with barely energy for a pun. The muscular river crawls on its belly in a maple coat of mail. Muddy and unreflective, it smells as if it too could use some privacy. The sumac reddens like a face, holding out its velvet pods almost desperately. The Queen Anne’s Lace clicks in the wind. A deaf-mute milkweed foaming at the mouth. Back at the field I look for what I didn’t mean to drop. The grass is green. Okay, Day, my host, I want to get out of your house. Come on, Night, with your twinkly stars and big dumb moon. Tell me don’t show me, and wipe that grin off your face.

I In these I find my calling: In the shower, in the mirror, in unconscious Hours spent staring at a screen At artifacts complete unto themselves. I think of them as self-sufficient worlds Where I can sojourn for a while, Then wake to find the clouds dispersing And the sidewalks steaming with the Rain that must have fallen while I stayed inside. The sun is shining, and the quiet Doubts are answered with more doubts, For as the years begin to mirror one another And the diary in the brain implodes, What filters through the theories on the page Is a kind of settledness, an equilibrium Between the life I have and what time seemed to hold— These rooms, these poems, these ordinary streets That spring to life each summer in an intricate construction Blending failed hopes and present happiness— Which from the outside seems like self-deception. There is no end to these reflections, To their measured music with its dying fall Wherein the heart and what it seeks are reconciled. I live them, and as though in gratitude They shape my days, from morning with its sweetest smile Until the hour when sleep blows out the candle. Between, the present falls away, And for a while the old romance resumes, Familiar but unrecognized, an undiscovered place Concealed within the confines of this room, That seems at once a form of feeling and a state of grace Prepared for me, written in my name Against the time when time has finally merged These commonplace surroundings with what lies behind the veil— Leaving behind at least a version of the truth Composed of what I felt and what I saw outside my window On a summer morning; melding sound and sense, A music and a mood, together in a hesitant embrace That makes them equal at the end. II There may be nothing for a poem to change But an atmosphere: conventional or strange, Its meaning is enclosed by the perception —Better, by the misperception— Of what time held and what the future knew; Which is to say this very moment. And yet the promise of a distant Purpose is what makes each moment new. There may be nothing for the soul to say In its defense, except to describe the way It came to find itself at the impasse Morning reveals in the glass— The road that led away from home to here, That began in wonderment and hope, But that ended in the long slope Down to loneliness and the fear of fear. The casuistry is all in the event, Contingent on what someone might have meant Or might still mean. What feels most frightening Is the thought that when the lightning Has subsided, and the clearing sky Appears at last above the stage To mark the only end of age, That God, that distant and unseeing eye, Would see that none of this had ever been: That none of it, apparent or unseen, Was ever real, and all the private words, Which seemed to fill the air like birds Exploding from the brush, were merely sounds Without significance or sense, Inert and dead beneath the dense Expanse of the earth in its impassive rounds. There may be no rejoinder to that thought. There may be nothing that one could have sought That might have lent the search significance, Or even a kind of coherence. Perhaps. Yet closer to me than the grandeur Of the vast and the uncreated Is the calm of this belated Moment in its transitory splendor. III Someone asked about the aura of regret And disappointment that surrounds these poems, About the private facts those feelings might conceal, And what their source was in my life. I said that none of it was personal, That as lives go my own life was a settled one, Comprising both successes and misfortunes, the successes Not especially striking, the misfortunes small. And yet the question is a real one, And not for me alone, though certainly for me. For even if, as Wittgenstein once claimed, That while the facts may stay the same And what is true of one is true of both, The happy and unhappy man inhabit different worlds, One still would want to know which world this is, And how that other one could seem so close. So much of how life feels lies in the phrasing, In the way a thought starts, then turns back upon itself Until its question hangs unanswered in the breeze. Perhaps the sadness is a way of seeming free, Of denying what can change or disappear, Of tearing free from circumstance, As though the soul could only speak out from the Safety of some private chamber in the air. Let me try once more. I think the saddest moments Are the ones that also seem most beautiful, For the nature of a moment is to fade, Leaving everything unaltered, and the landscape Where the light fell as it was before. And time makes poetry from what it takes away, And the measure of experience Is not that it be real, but that it last, And what one knows is simply what one knew, And what I want is simply what I had. These are the premises that structure what I feel, The axioms that govern my imagination, And beneath them lies the fear— Not the fear of the unknown, but the fear of growing old Unchanged, of looking in the mirror At a future that repeats itself ad infinitum. It could be otherwise so easily. The transience that lectures so insistently of loss Could speak as clearly of an openness renewed, A life made sweeter by its changing; And the shadows of the past Could seem a shade where one could linger for a while Before returning to the world, and moving on. The way would be the same in either case, Extending for an unknown span of years Experienced from two perspectives, a familiar course Accessible to all, yet narrowing, As the journey nears its end, to one. The difference isn’t in the details Or the destination, but in how things feel along the road: The secret of the quest lies all around me, While what lurks below the surface is another story, One of no more consequence or import than the last. What matters isn’t what one chances to believe, But the force of one’s attachments, And instead of looking for an answer in a dream Set aside the question, let the songs continue Going through the motions of the days And waking every morning to this single world, Whether in regret, or in celebration. IV Each day begins as yesterday began: A cat in silhouette in the dim light Of what the morning holds— Breakfast and The New York Times, a man Taking a shower, a poem taking flight As a state of mind unfolds So unpredictably. Through the hot summer air I walk to a building where I give a lecture on philosophy In the strict sense; then go home to the cat. A narrow life; or put another way, A life whose facts can all Be written on a page, the narrow format Of this tiny novel of a day, Ulysses written small, A diary so deep Its rhythms seem unreal: A solitary meal. Some records or a movie. And then sleep. V At the ending of the remake of The Thing Kurt Russell and one other guy Are all that’s left of what had been the crew Of an Antarctic outpost. Some horrifying presence —Some protean thing—establishes itself Inside the person of an ordinary man And then, without a warning, erupts in devastation. The two survivors eye each other slowly, Neither knowing whether one of them Still holds the horror. “What do we do now?” The second asks, and Russell says, “Let’s see what happens,” and the movie ends. “Horror” is too strong, but substitute the fear I spoke about before, and the scene is apt. I don’t know, as no one really knows, What might lie waiting in the years to come, But sometimes when the question touches me I feel afraid— Not of age, but an age that seems a prolongation of this afternoon, That looks ahead, and looks instead into itself. This is the fear that draws me back inside: That this is all there is, that what I hold so easily Will vanish soon, and nothing like it will be given me again. The days will linger and the nights rehearse themselves Until the secret of my life has finally emerged— Not in devastation, but in a long decline That leads at least as surely to a single end. And then I turn away and see the sky That soars above the streets of North Point North, Reducing everyone to anonymity, an anonymity In which I find a kind of possibility, a kind of freedom As the world—the only world—rolls on its way, Oblivious to anything I might say, or that might happen in a poem. A poem can seize and hold a moment fast, yet it can Limit what there is to feel, and stake a distance from the world. The neighborhood around me wakes each day to lives No different than my own, lives harboring the same ambitions And regrets, but living on the humbler stuff of happiness. The disappointments come and go; what stays Is part of an abiding presence, human and serene. The houses wait unquestioning in the light Of an approaching summer evening, while a vast Contentment answers from the air. I think I know where this is going to end, But still my pleasure is to wait— Not wait, perhaps, for anything within, But for what lies outside. Let’s see what happens.

for Richard Hugo You hear the roadhouse before you see it, Its four-beat country tunes Amplified like surf through the woods, Silencing bullfrog and red-tailed hawk, Setting beards of moss dancing On dim, indeterminate trees That border two-lane blacktop. Docked tonight, you reveal the badge Of the farmer, that blanched expanse of skin Where cap shades face, babyhood Pallor above the sun-blackened jaw Bulging uneasy with a concrete grin And some inevitable need to weep. Don’t you think we live and breathe In the meantime, in lockstep With dawn, sunset, brawling dawn? Even now, you await secrets worse Than the few known ways a seized sky Will come to survive your pity. But on another far field, celebrated For its arrivals and evictions, you learn To be beautiful, never leading A sensible life, playing ball in the early dark, Fighting for a taste of the sweet spot, In this uncut land, this straight-edged air. Whadya want to know that isn’t yet a mystery Somewhere, a confidential stumble, heat Lightning, a first-rate backseat turndown? So it is that later you track high above Familiar tamarack and ash, beginning The next inaccuracy alone, and again, Remembering that everything east of you Has already happened, on the same cold ground, In a swarm of time, finally spiked home To your surprise, nails flung to the air. And us all thumbs to the hot hammer-licks You hear from the roadhouse before you see it.

homage to William Empson It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, Landing every poem like a fish. Unhuman forms must not assert their roles. Glittering scales require the deadly tolls Of net and knife. Scales fall to relish. It is the sense, it is the sense, controls. Yet languages are apt to miss on souls If reason only guts them. Applying the wish, Unhuman forms must not assert their roles, Ignores the fact that poems have two poles That must be opposite. Hard then to finish It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, Without a sense of lining up for doles From other kitchens that give us the garnish: Unhuman forms must not assert their roles. And this (forgive me) is like carrying coals To Sheffield. Irrelevance betrays a formal anguish. It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, “Unhuman forms must not assert their roles”.

Who did he talk to Did she trust what she saw Who does the talking Whose words formed awkward curves Did the lion finally talk Did the sleeping lion talk Did you trust a north window What made the dog bark What causes a grey dog to bark What does the juggler tell us What does the juggler’s redness tell us Is she standing in an image Were they lost in the forest Were they walking through a forest Has anything been forgotten Did you find it in the dark Is that one of them new atomic-powered wristwatches Was it called a talking song Is that an oblong poem Was poetry the object Was there once a road here ending at a door Thus from bridge to bridge we came along Did the machine seem to talk Did he read from an empty book Did the book grow empty in the dark, grey felt hat blowing down the street, arms pumping back and forth, legs slightly bowed Are there fewer ears than songs Did he trust a broken window Did he wake beneath a tree in the recent snow Whose words formed difficult curves Have the exaggerations quieted down The light is lovely on trees which are not large My logic is all in the melting-pot My life now is very economical I can say nothing of my feeling about space Nothing could be clearer than what you see on this wall Must we give each one a name Is it true they all have names Would it not have been simpler Would it not have been simpler to begin Were there ever such buildings I must remember to mention the trees I must remember to invent some trees Who told you these things Who taught you how to speak Who taught you not to speak Whose is the voice that empties