1630 Nature poems

for Jean Brockway When the walkers-on-water went under, the bog-walkers came out of the barberry thickets, booted in gum to their hips, in a corona of midges, their ears electric with sound, beating the stale of the swamp with their whips and flailing the ground for the itch under the frond, the fern’s demonology, the mosquito’s decibel. Night-sweat clotted their palms. They tasted their gall. The sumac flickered a swatch of its leaves in the lichens and venoms, a dazzle was seen in the fog as a vegetal world gave way to a uterine, pitch pulled at their heels and blackened their knuckles, the bog-laurel’s fan opened its uttermost decimal and showed them the Bog. Paradisal, beyond purpose or menace, dewed like the flesh of an apple with the damp of creation, the disk of the pond glowed under the dragonfly’s bosses, where a faulting of glaciers had left it—vaults of bog-rosemary, buckbean and Labrador tea, a dapple of leavening mosses soaking in ice-water, peat-wicks feeding their gas to the cranberry braziers. They entered the bonfire together. The moss took their weight like a trampoline: they walked on the sponge and bitumen without leaving a footprint. In between, in the vats of mat-roses where the waterline closed like a skin, the ambiguous world of imbalance, non-being, the pre-human and tentative, was one with the ludicrous. The quaking began—under their bootsoles at first, like a whale under ambergris, then cramming their wrists with a drummer’s vibrations, knocking their ribs and their knees as all sagged and rebounded. They lurched on the wet as though tracing a profile of breakers or displacing the cords and the voids of a net, and staggered back into their childhoods, till their feet touched the granite again. The bog tossed them over the threshold that opened a path in the spruce toward the opposite edges. The leaves closed behind them. They walked an unyielding and tangible world like strangers, remembering only the hovering glare where the pitcher-plant’s hammer closed on the fly—the light shaking and shaking— as a pulse touched their feet from below, and passed over.

Along the grave green downs, this idle afternoon, Shadows of loitering silver clouds, becalmed in blue, Bring, like unfoldment of a flower, the best of June. Shadows outspread in spacious movement, always you Have dappled the downs and valleys at this time of year, While larks, ascending shrill, praised freedom as they flew. Now, through that song, a fighter-squadron’s drone I hear From Scratchbury Camp, whose turfed and cowslip’d rampart seems More hill than history, ageless and oblivion-blurred. I walk the fosse, once manned by bronze and flint-head spear; On war’s imperious wing the shafted sun-ray gleams: One with the warm sweet air of summer stoops the bird. Cloud shadows, drifting slow like heedless daylight dreams, Dwell and dissolve; uncircumstanced they pause and pass. I watch them go. My horse, contented, crops the grass.

Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes To pace the ground, if path be there or none, While a fair region round the traveller lies Which he forbears again to look upon; Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene, The work of Fancy, or some happy tone Of meditation, slipping in between The beauty coming and the beauty gone. If Thought and Love desert us, from that day Let us break off all commerce with the Muse: With Thought and Love companions of our way, Whate'er the senses take or may refuse, The Mind's internal heaven shall shed her dews Of inspiration on the humblest lay.

There are days I don’t think about the sea; weeks wash by in fact, then a shearwater—or some such—flutters by on the salt flats fanning out in my mind’s eye, reflected there, a shimmering reverie, recalling the pact I once made (and renew today) to hold to a higher altitude. But note the difference between this bird and me: a slight disruption or harsh word and I crash, folded seaward, letting cold life intrude; whereas the petrel, mindless of such height, scales each watery hill that rises up, adapting to the shape of each impediment, each low escape instinct in it, the scope of its flight fitted to its will.

Adrift in the liberating, late light of August, delicate, frivolous, they make their way to my front porch and flutter near the glassed-in bulb, translucent as a thought suddenly wondered aloud, illumining the air that's thick with honeysuckle and dusk. You and I are doing our best at conversation, keeping it light, steering clear of what we'd like to say. You leave, and the night becomes cluttered with moths, some tattered, their dumbly curious filaments startling against my cheek. How quickly, instinctively, I brush them away. Dazed, they cling to the outer darkness like pale reminders of ourselves. Others seem to want so desperately to get inside. Months later, I'll find the woolens, snug in their resting places, full of missing pieces.

A translator who has a phobia of moths spent three years translating a book with a moth motif. It’s ironic, she has said, that she knew more about the moths than the author of the original, who was merely fascinated. The translation contained a greater variety of moths than the original, drawn from suggestions she had made, some of which were in fact too perfect and changed back before it went to print. Her moths, the ones that were too aptly named, meant too much, her moths that she hated, where are they now? The same place as all the versions of people that have been undressed and slept with, in lieu of the people themselves, by others. That must include a version of almost everyone, lots of versions of some people, some only a flutter, animated then decided against.

I’m talking about Mount Street. Jackhammers give it the staggers. They’re tearing up dear Mount Street. It’s got a torn-up face like Mick Jagger’s. I mean, this is Mount Street! Scott’s restaurant, the choicest oysters, brilliant fish; Purdey, the great shotgun maker—the street is complete Posh plush and (except for Marc Jacobs) so English. Remember the old Mount Street, The quiet that perfumed the air Like a flowering tree and smelled sweet As only money can smell, because after all this was Mayfair? One used to stay at the Connaught Till they closed it for a makeover. One was distraught To see the dark wood brightened and sleekness take over. Designer grease Will help guests slide right into the zone. Prince Charles and his design police Are tickled pink because it doesn’t threaten the throne. I exaggerate for effect— But isn’t it grand, the stink of the stank, That no sooner had the redone hotel just about got itself perfect Than the local council decided: new street, new sidewalk, relocate the taxi rank! Turn away from your life—away from the noise!— Leaving the Connaught and Carlos Place behind. Hidden away behind those redbrick buildings across the street are serious joys: Green grandeur on a small enough scale to soothe your mind, And birdsong as liquid as life was before you were born. Whenever I’m in London I stop by this delightful garden to hear The breeze in the palatial trees blow its shepherd’s horn. I sit on a bench in Mount Street Gardens and London is nowhere near.

Now I have tempered haste, The joyous traveller said, The steed has passed me now Whose hurrying hooves I fled. My spectre rides thereon, I learned what mount he has, Upon what summers fed; And wept to know again, Beneath the saddle swung, Treasure for whose great theft This breast was wrung. His bridle bells sang out, I could not tell their chime, So brilliantly he rings, But called his name as Time. His bin was morning light, Those straws which gild his bed Are of the fallen West. Although green lands consume Beneath their burning tread, In everlasting bright His hooves have rest.

On the day I set out on the climb, grief saddled in my back like a bag of marbles, my breath like clouds hanging on the low peaks of a mountain, on the day I set out leaving nothing behind, nothing on the bed, no version of myself, just my voice through the night, the voice I use to ward off nightmares. (My voice is a still life in itself, a shroud green and ultramarine deep blue, a bowl of apples and tangerines on a table.) On the day I set out, the mountain is high in front of me, the unreliable god of mist and fog. I have no voice to say how high my fingers must lift as if on a lover's upper lip, to take in the breath of how high my mountain is—white teeth behind a snow cap, numberless springs, cold like the enzymes in spit— a version of me is still asleep: the moving of a limb in sleep. Everything becomes lucid.

The mountain have changed to buildings Is this hallway the inside of a stem That has a rattling flower for a head, Immense tree bark with roots made out of Mailboxes? In the vertical village moons fly out of Apartment windows and though what you See is a modern city The mountain’s guitars pluck inside It’s agriculture taking an elevator Through urban caves which lead to Paths underground They say Camuy To Hutuado Taino subground like the IRT in Constant motion The streets take walks in your dark eyes Seashell necklaces make music in the Origin of silence What are we stepping on? Pineapple Fields frozen with snow Concrete dirt later the rocks of the Atlantic The sculpture of the inner earth Down there where you thought only worms And unnamed crocodiles parade Lefty stands on a corner Analyzing every seed Squeezing the walls as he passes Through at the bottom of the basement Where the boiler makes heat The flesh arrives out of a hole In the mountain that goes up like a Green wall Bodies come in making maraca sounds An invisible map out of the flora Bees arrive in the vicinity and sing Chorus while woody woodpeckers make Women out of trees and place flowers On their heads Waterfalls like Hurakan’s faucets Caress the back of Yuquiyu God to all whose tongues have the Arawak’s echoes Hallway of graffiti like the master Cave drawings made by owls when they Had hands You see the fish with pyramids inside Their stomachs Hanging near the doorways where San Lazaro turns the keys Villa Manhattan Breeze of saint juice made from Coconuts Slide down the stairs to your Belly and like a hypnotized guanabana You float down the street And win all your hands at dominoes The Moros live on the top floor eating Roots and have a rooster on the roof Africans import okra from the bodega The Indians make a base of guava On the first floor The building is spinning itself into a spiral of salsa Heaven must be calling or the Residents know the direction Because there is an upward pull If you rise too quickly from your seat You might have to comb a spirit’s Hair They float over the chimneys Arrive through the smog Appear through the plaster of Paris It is the same people in the windowed Mountains.