1630 Nature poems

If aught of oaten stop, or past'ral song, May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear, Like thy own solemn springs, Thy springs and dying gales, O nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts, With brede ethereal wove, O'erhang his wavy bed; Now air is hushed, save where the weak-ey'd bat With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path Against the pilgrim, borne in heedless hum: Now teach me, maid composed, To breathe some softened strain, Whose numbers stealing through thy dark'ning vale May not unseemly with its stillness suit, As musing slow, I hail Thy genial loved return. For when thy folding star arising shows His paly circlet, at his warning lamp The fragrant Hours, and elves Who slept in flowers the day, And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge And sheds the fresh'ning dew, and lovelier still, The pensive pleasures sweet Prepare thy shad'wy car. Then lead, calm votress, where some sheety lake Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallowed pile Or upland fallows grey Reflect its last cool gleam. But when chill blust'ring winds, or driving rain, Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut That from the mountain's side Views wilds, and swelling floods, And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires, And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil. While Spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont, And bathe thy breathing tresses, meekest Eve; While Summer loves to sport Beneath thy ling'ring light; While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves; Or Winter, yelling through the troublous air, Affrights thy shrinking train And rudely rends thy robes; So long, sure-found beneath the sylvan shed, Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lipp'd Health, Thy gentlest influence own, And hymn thy fav'rite name!

which regenerate their tails and also eat only the tails of other electric eels, presumably smaller, who, in turn, eat ... Without consulting an ichthyologist — eels are fish — I defer to biology’s genius. I know little of their numbers and habitat, other than they are river dwellers. Guess which river. I have only a note, a note taken in reading or fever — I can’t tell, from my handwriting, which. All I know is it seems sensible, sustainable: no fish dies, nobody ever gets so hungry he bites off more than a tail; the sting, the trauma keeps the bitten fish lean and alert. The need to hide while regrowing a tail teaches guile. They’ll eat smaller tails for a while. These eels, these eels themselves are odes!

The country I come from Is called the Midwest —Bob Dylan I want to be doused in cheese & fried. I want to wander the aisles, my heart's supermarket stocked high as cholesterol. I want to die wearing a sweatsuit— I want to live forever in a Christmas sweater, a teddy bear nursing off the front. I want to write a check in the express lane. I want to scrape my driveway clean myself, early, before anyone's awake— that'll put em to shame— I want to see what the sun sees before it tells the snow to go. I want to be the only black person I know. I want to throw out my back & not complain about it. I wanta drive two blocks. Why walk— I want love, n stuff— I want to cut my sutures myself. I want to jog down to the river & make it my bed— I want to walk its muddy banks & make me a withdrawal. I tried jumping in, found it frozen— I'll go home, I guess, to my rooms where the moon changes & shines like television.

I O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear! II Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion, Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith's height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear! III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic's level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear! IV If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

As the tide rises, the closed mollusc Opens a fraction to the ocean's food, Bathed in its riches. Do not ask What force would do, or if force could. A knife is of no use against a fortress. You might break it to pieces as gulls do. No, only the rising tide and its slow progress Opens the shell. Lovers, I tell you true. You who have held yourselves closed hard Against warm sun and wind, shelled up in fears And hostile to a touch or tender word— The ocean rises, salt as unshed tears. Now you are floated on this gentle flood That cannot force or be forced, welcome food Salt as your tears, the rich ocean's blood, Eat, rest, be nourished on the tide of love.

Some nothing afternoon, no one anywhere, an early autumn stillness in the air, the kind of empty day you fill by taking in the full size of the valley and its layers leading slowly to the Blue Ridge, the quality of country, if you stand here long enough, you could stay for, step into, the way a landscape, even on a wall, pulls you in, one field at a time, pasture and fall meadow, high above the harvest, perfect to the tree line, then spirit clouds and intermittent sunlit smoky rain riding the tops of the mountains, though you could walk until it’s dark and not reach those rains— you could walk the rest of the day into the picture and not know why, at any given moment, you’re there.

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place, that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. Wherefrom fall all architectures I am I say are likenesses of the First Beloved whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady. She it is Queen Under The Hill whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words that is a field folded. It is only a dream of the grass blowing east against the source of the sun in an hour before the sun’s going down whose secret we see in a children’s game of ring a round of roses told. Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos, that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is.

Often I imagine the earth through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of— atoms, peculiar atoms everywhere— no me, no you, no opinions, no beginning, no middle, no end, soaring together like those ancient Chinese birds hatched miraculously with only one wing, helping each other fly home.

Oh, fly, you flew onto my leaf and not my food. What a relief! For on my food you'd bring me grief as you're a vector of disease. But you on leaf? My mind's at ease. And there is much to please my eye. For oh, you are a lovely fly. Just do not go and multiply.

For a place I hate, I invoke you often. Stockholm’s: I am eight years old and the telephone poles are down, the power plant at the edge of town spitting electricity. Before the pickup trucks, the strip malls, dirt beaten by Cherokee feet.Osiyo, tsilugi. Rope swung from mule to tent to man, tornadoes came, the wind rearranged the face of the land like a chessboard. This was before the gold rush, the greed of engines, before white men pressing against brown women, nailing crosses by the river, before the slow songs of cotton plantations, the hymns toward God, the murdered dangling like earrings. Under a redwood, two men signed away the land and in history class I don’t understand why a boy whispers sand monkey. The Mexican girls let me sit with them as long as I braid their hair, my fingers dipping into that wet black silk. I try to imitate them at home —mírame, mama— but my mother yells at me, says they didn’t come here so I could speak some beggar language. Heaven is a long weekend. Heaven is a tornado 
siren canceling school. Heaven is pressed in a pleather booth at the Olive Garden, sipping Pepsi between my gapped teeth, listening to my father mispronounce his meal.