1630 Nature poems

At Wilshire & Santa Monica I saw an opossum Trying to cross the street. It was late, the street Was brightly lit, the opossum would take A few steps forward, then back away from the breath Of moving traffic. People coming out of the bars Would approach, as if to help it somehow. It would lift its black lips & show them The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors, Teeth that went all the way back beyond The flames of Troy & Carthage, beyond sheep Grazing rock-strewn hills, fragments of ruins In the grass at San Vitale. It would back away Delicately & smoothly, stepping carefully As it always had. It could mangle someone’s hand In twenty seconds. Mangle it for good. It could Sever it completely from the wrist in forty. There was nothing to be done for it. Someone Or other probably called the LAPD, who then Called Animal Control, who woke a driver, who Then dressed in mailed gloves, the kind of thing Small knights once wore into battle, who gathered Together his pole with a noose on the end, A light steel net to snare it with, someone who hoped The thing would have vanished by the time he got there.

See how the orient dew, Shed from the bosom of the morn Into the blowing roses, Yet careless of its mansion new, For the clear region where ’twas born Round in itself incloses: And in its little globe’s extent, Frames as it can its native element. How it the purple flow’r does slight, Scarce touching where it lies, But gazing back upon the skies, Shines with a mournful light, Like its own tear, Because so long divided from the sphere. Restless it rolls and unsecure, Trembling lest it grow impure, Till the warm sun pity its pain, And to the skies exhale it back again. So the soul, that drop, that ray Of the clear fountain of eternal day, Could it within the human flow’r be seen, Remembering still its former height, Shuns the sweet leaves and blossoms green, And recollecting its own light, Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express The greater heaven in an heaven less. In how coy a figure wound, Every way it turns away: So the world excluding round, Yet receiving in the day, Dark beneath, but bright above, Here disdaining, there in love. How loose and easy hence to go, How girt and ready to ascend, Moving but on a point below, It all about does upwards bend. Such did the manna’s sacred dew distill, White and entire, though congealed and chill, Congealed on earth : but does, dissolving, run Into the glories of th’ almighty sun.

The sheep-killing dogs saunter home, wool scraps in their teeth. From the den of the moon ancestral wolves howl their approval. The farm boys, asleep in their beds, live the same wildness under their lids; every morning they come back through the whites of their eyes to do their chores, their hands pausing to pet the dog, to press its ears back, over the skull, to quiet that other world.

From the high terrace porch I watch the dawn. No light appears, though dark has mostly gone, Sunk from the cold and monstrous stone. The hills Lie naked but not light. The darkness spills Down the remoter gulleys; pooled, will stay Too low to melt, not yet alive with day. Below the windows, the lawn, matted deep Under its close-cropped tips with dewy sleep, Gives off a faint hush, all its plushy swarm Alive with coolness reaching to be warm. Gray windows at my back, the massy frame Dull with the blackness that has not a name; But down below, the garden is still young, Of five years’ growth, perhaps, and terrace-hung, Drop by slow drop of seeping concrete walls. Such are the bastions of our pastorals! Here are no palms! They once lined country ways, Where old white houses glared down dusty days, With small round towers, blunt-headed through small trees. Those towers are now the hiving place of bees. The palms were coarse; their leaves hung thick with dust; The roads were muffled deep. But now deep rust Has fastened on the wheels that labored then. Peace to all such, and to all sleeping men! I lived my childhood there, a passive dream In the expanse of that recessive scheme. Slow air, slow fire! O deep delay of Time! That summer crater smoked like slaking lime, The hills so dry, so dense the underbrush, That where I pushed my way the giant hush Was changed to soft explosion as the sage Broke down to powdered ash, the sift of age, And fell along my path, a shadowy rift. On these rocks now no burning ashes drift; Mowed lawn has crept along the granite bench; The yellow blossoms of acacia drench The dawn with pollen; and, with waxen green, The long leaves of the eucalypti screen The closer hills from view—lithe, tall, and fine, And nobly clad with youth, they bend and shine. The small dark pool, jutting with living rock, Trembles at every atmospheric shock, Blurred to its depth with the cold living ooze. From cloudy caves, heavy with summer dews, The shyest and most tremulous beings stir, The pulsing of their fins a lucent blur, That, like illusion, glances off the view. The pulsing mouths, like metronomes, are true, This is my father’s house, no homestead here That I shall live in, but a shining sphere Of glass and glassy moments, frail surprise, My father’s phantasy of Paradise; Which melts upon his death, which he attained With loss of heart for every step he gained. Too firmly gentle to displace the great, He crystallized this vision somewhat late; Forbidden now to climb the garden stair, He views the terrace from a window chair. His friends, hard shaken by some twenty years, Tremble with palsy and with senile fears, In their late middle age gone cold and gray. Fine men, now broken. That the vision stay, They spend astutely their depleted breath, With tired ironic faces wait for death. Below the garden the hills fold away. Deep in the valley, a mist fine as spray, Ready to shatter into spinning light, Conceals the city at the edge of night. The city, on the tremendous valley floor, Draws its dream deeper for an instant more, Superb on solid loam, and breathing deep, Poised for a moment at the edge of sleep. Cement roads mark the hills, wide, bending free Of cliff and headland. Dropping toward the sea, Through suburb after suburb, vast ravines Swell to the summer drone of fine machines. The driver, melting down the distance here, May cast in flight the faint hoof of a deer Or pass the faint head set perplexedly. And man-made stone outgrows the living tree, And at its rising, air is shaken, men Are shattered, and the tremor swells again, Extending to the naked salty shore, Rank with the sea, which crumbles evermore.

December 13, 1993 John Gordon Boyd died on the birthday of three remarkable, and remarkably different, writers: Heinrich Heine, Kenneth Patchen, Ross McDonald John, too, was just as remarkable, blessed with an inherent “graciousness” and with extraordinary eyes & ears… I think of two texts on the grievous occasion of his death: “Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what I can touch, and look at. My Gods dwell in temples made with hands.” — Oscar Wilde, in De Profundis and two lines in Rainier Maria Rilke, John’s favorite poet, that say it all… Was tun Sie, Gott, Wenn ich bin st ü rbe? “What will you do, God, when I am dead?”

This one got tired of lugging his fortress wherever he went, was done with duck and cover at every explosion through rustling leaves of fox and dog and skunk. Said au revoir to the ritual of pulling himself together. . . I imagine him waiting for the cover of darkness to let down his hinged drawbridge. He wanted, after so many protracted years of caution, to dance naked and nimble as a flame under the moon— even if dancing just once was all that the teeth of the forest would allow.

All those poems I wrote About living in the sky Were wrong. I live on a leaf Of   a fern of   frost growing Up your bedroom window In forty below. I live on a needle of   a branch Of   a cedar tree, hard-bitten, Striving in six directions, Rooted in rock, a cedar Tree made of other trees, Not cedar but fir, Lodgepole, and blue spruce, Metastasizing like Bacteria to the fan- Lip of a draw to draw Water as soon as it slips From the snowdrift’s grip And flows downward from Branch to root — a tree Running in reverse. Or I live on a thorn on a trellis — Trained, restrained, maybe Cut back, to hold up Those flowers I’ve only heard of To whatever there is and isn’t Above.

When I read about the garden designed to bloom only white flowers, I think about the Spanish friar who saw one of my grandmothers, two hundred years removed, and fucked her. If you look at the word colony far enough, you see it traveling back to the Latin of inhabit,till, and cultivate. Words that would have meant something to the friar, walking among the village girls as though in a field of flowers, knowing that fucking was one way of   having a foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snow falling, which means that every angry thought is as short-lived as a match. The night is its own white garden: snow on the fence, snow on the tree stump, snow on the azalea bushes, their leaves hanging down like green bats from the branches. I know it’s not fair to see qualities of injustice in the aesthetics of a garden, but somewhere between what the eye sees and what the mind thinks is the world, landscapes mangled into sentences, one color read into rage. When the neighbors complained the roots of our cypress were buckling their lot, my landlord cut the tree down. I didn’t know a living thing three stories high could be so silent, until it was gone. Suddenly that sky. Suddenly all the light in the windows, as though every sheet of glass was having a migraine. When I think about that grandmother whose name I don’t even know, I think of what it would mean to make a garden that blooms black: peonies and gladiolas of deepest purple, tulips like ravens. Or a garden that doesn’t bloom at all: rocks poised on clean gravel. When the snow stops, I walk to see the quiet that has colonized everything. The main street is asleep, except for the bus that goes by, bright as a cruise ship. There are sheet cakes of  snow on top of cars. In front of   houses, each lawn is as clean as paper, except where the first cat or raccoon has walked across, each track like a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.

Oh! could I see as thou hast seen, The garden of the west, When Spring in all her loveliness Fair nature’s face has dressed. The rolling prairie, vast and wild! It hath a charm for me— Its tall grass waving to the breeze, Like billows on the sea. Say, hast thou chased the bounding deer When smiled the rosy morn? Or hast thou listened to the sound Of the merry hunter’s horn? Once could the noble red-man call That prairie wild his home;— His cabin now in ruins laid, He must an exile roam, And thou at twilight’s pensive hour, Perchance hast seen him weep;— Tread lightly o’er the hallowed spot, For there his kindred sleep. I envy not the opulent His proud and lordly dome; Far happier is the pioneer Who seeks a prairie home;— Where no discordant notes are heard, But all is harmony; Where soars aloft unfettered thought, And the heart beats light and free.

My father in the aluminum stern, cursing another fouled blood-knot: all the shits and fucks as integral to the art of fishing as the bait-fish, little silver smelts I sewed like a manual transmission, the same inbred order and precision needling the leader through the ass, out the mouth, through the jaw, out the nostril and back down—suffering as my father suffered the bastard no-see-ums and the guttering Johnson the obligatory dud, orange egg-pearls ballooning from its bust underside, hundreds of duds like every shit-luck setback that drove us on, fed by the huge image of everything we'd never caught, moving in joint blindness under Munsungun. And whatever it was it was the fight that delivered us—a tension like a sequestered muscle, the line spooling, unspooling, the holy-shit- litany pulled from our awed mouths contracting with distance until a whole silence surfaced, the viscid, slapping body absorbing and reflecting raw light like the bit of cornea above a pupil. And then his tremendous, decent hands brandishing an oar-butt; the brilliant lace of the gills, their crumpled hinge flaring in bilge water; and the line, whipping and shuttling, feeding invisibly back, moving on on Munsungun, sons survived by the same damn hunt they heired.